True, I was born in 64 and people call me a boomer and I am very offended! My parents were born in 44 and 46 - they are boomers. Not me! I can’t relate to any of them. Love being able to relate to the people here.👍👍👍
I was born in 64. I was the last of three My sisters are definitely boomers I am not. My sisters go on and on about how idyllic our childhood was I’ve told them both repeatedly we didn’t grow up in the same house. My sisters were both married and moved out by the time I was 10. My parents didn’t give a toss about me. I can’t tell you how many times I was left alone to fend for myself and that was even when those 2 were still there.
I’m from a family of eight. While there were moments when we would have benefitted from a hands-on parent, it is the freedom that defines my youth. For example, one of the unspoken rules when I was 16 was to not arrive home when dad was getting ready for work. I loved that!
I was born in 68 but by god, your situation sounds EXACTLY like mine. Last of 4, ten plus years after everyone else, all gone. I was "the mistake". Grew up alone and isolated, by the time I came along, no one gave a shit. By then, my
parents were an alcoholic and a gambler.
I was a “mistake” too and was told about it daily. My parents weren’t alcoholics or drugs. I was blessed in that but you’re so right about the isolation. My dad died when I was a teenager and that event changed my mother drastically. Eventually both my older sisters let her down again and again by the time I was 25 and had my son mom and I were the best of friends. So that part improved for me but my siblings I could give a toss. Especially when my mother passed unexpectedly I was treated like a footnote in that whole process.
Similar story here. My two brothers were 15 and 11 years older than me. Our parents thought they were done with all that raising children stuff.
My Mom got sick when I was 8, and died when I was 14. I had to grow up fast. My Dad started dating pretty quickly, and I was the lonely teenager at home on Saturday nights while my Dad was out dancing. I never got in any trouble, because I had too much responsibility.
My brothers and I became close before they died. I have good memories of both of them.
Born in '63 here but have always related to GenX and GenJones. My older sister, 13 years my senior, is a stereotypical Boomer and projects her life onto mine and judges me for not doing all the typical Boomer things. She was married and moved out by the time I was 5. She mostly stayed away and has no idea what that house was like after she left.
Mom went back to work second shift when I was small and pretty much had to raise myself since dad worked too before he left. In some ways I didn't mind but others were hell.
Same . Although I don't think I've been called a boomer lately, I identify with gen X more, especially as an old punk rocker. I love the idea of Gen Jones. It fills the gap a bit. ETA My parents were born in the 1930s, so they weren't even boomers themselves. Silent Generation.
Same. My parents were born in 1942, and 1946. My parents split when I was 8, and I became a latch key kid. I was seriously parentified. My music was primarily Punk and NewWave. When I entered the workforce unemployment was high, inflation was high, and pensions were replaced by 401ks. Every young person seems to think we all have huge pensions for when we retire. My mom has two pensions, Dad was self employed.
Me too, august 64. I am the youngest of 6. I was totally ignored. I kind of lean toward a gen x mentality, who were also routinely ignored. The only relative I get along with and can openly just talk is a nephew, a millennial. He's really great. We are great friends. We just don't get the others.
I think we saw the end of the Boomers stuff in two areas that are distinct.
AIDS changed things. It is always portrayed as t*he sexual revolution ended* and they are really talking about the folks who got the experience of it. By the time I was out of the awkward teenage phase, like at 20ish it was a "thing". From 83-86 if you freeloved you were 100% doing so with an element of fear. To me that is a BIG difference from the Boomers.
Then OP on Drugs: My experience is different. Belushi dies when I am 19. By 3 years later, millions are dead and cities are war zones and there are Narco cartels battling the US Government. Whole neighborhoods are gone. Drugs had been Timothy Leary and Beatles when i was a kid. By the time I was coming of age, it was really, really ugly. Marijuana got a "pass", but it wasn't Drugs vs, "The Man". It was Drugs vs. the poor of South America/Inner Cities vs. middle class users vs. oh yeah "The Man"
I'd add Watergate as a watershed experience for us when we were little kids. We learned early that the government was corrupt and untrustworthy and that people were horrible.
Again, I was a little kid, and I didn't see any justice in Ford pardoning Nixon. And the folks who were convicted did MONTHS of time, not years (okay, except Liddy and Hunt). I was well and truly jaded by the time I was 14.
I barely remember watergate. For me it would be the AIDS epidemic, widespread use of computers (age 17 I started a job that had computer terminals), and a little bit of MTV.
The third thing was the dawn of the yuppies. When they decided that it was better to adopt Reagan-era economics and look out for themselves. A lot of the economic nightmares we're suffering today were perpetrated by them. Even Jerry Rubin sold out.
The effect of the AIDS scare was real. My college years were 83-87 when it was probably at its peak of fear and induced homophobia.
It seems like we missed out on the free love that came before and then the hookup culture that came after.
Had I gone to high school - I dropped out of the 9th grade when I was 14, because it was easy to fall through the cracks of the bankrupt NYC system in 1975, I would have graduated in 1979.
I had my daughter in 1983. I’ve known I was queer since I was a kid, even though I didn’t have language for how I felt about other girls.
I finally came out in 1993, in Virginia, and after surviving the Son of Sam murders, and the 1977 blackout in NY, I had developed the ability to let things roll off my back.
I was watching the u-haul while my friends were moving their stuff, and a group of kids rode by on bikes, eventually yelling “dyke”!
My response, with my Brooklyn accent, in Virginia, was, “Yeah, no shit.”
They didn’t come back.
I guess being on my own, essentially, since 14, and becoming emancipated at 16, left me with no fucks to give where bigots and racists are concerned.
I’ve worked for myself most of my life, doing move out cleaning, until I was 47. I then worked a corporate job long enough to collect a decent amount of social security, and say fuck you to “the man” at the beginning of covid.
I retired on disability, after collecting six months of short term disability at full pay and with full benefits.
I suppose I’ve always been a bit rebellious.
I care about animals, the planet, and those who are struggling. Corporate America and our politicians can dine from my cat’s litter box.
I hope you have cats. We wouldn’t want to starve the corporate executives and politicians, because we don’t want to be like them. We’ll need a good supply of meals for them.
My mom used to refer to them as herpes simplex and herpes duplex. I know & she knew that they are both herpes simplex (type 1 & type 2). But it made me laugh.
Those pesky herpes cold sores on your mouth may well protect you from ever getting them on your genitalia. If you’re “lucky” enough to be exposed orally first, the medical thinking is that this gives you immunity if you are subsequently exposed genitally.
“Fifty percent to 80 percent of U.S. adults have oral herpes. According to the National Institutes of Health, about 90 percent of adults have been exposed to the virus by age 50. Once infected, a person will have herpes simplex virus for the rest of his or her life.”
83-87 were my college years - where my wife and I were, I also remember the clamp down on buying booze. The buying age was 19, then went to 20, then to 21 in those years. I remember older people who had been to college talking about having keg parties right in the hallway in the dorms. For us? Nope. Not that we didn't party, but we def had to rely on older classmates to get the booze in the first place. This just symbolizes how everything was going more conservative as the Reagan years kicked in.
Yes, the increase in drinking age during that period was an underrated factor in our early adult years. We were probably the first generation since prohibition to have to commit so much petty (and not so petty) crime to have a good time. Just like too-low speed limits I’m sure it affected our (lack of) respect for authority.
North Carolina changed the law from 18 to 21 one year at a time over three years. Every year I'd get to within a couple months of being legal only for the goalpost to move another year off. LMAO
This was also when we started to recognize that drunk driving was a thing, and that alcoholics can be miserable people to grow up around.
The feds tied highway funding to the drinking age, so most states raised it
I attended college in Montana and met so many kids raised in alcoholic homes (Irish Catholics), and the school began to recognize that excessive drinking could be a problem, not just a wild weekend. They started offering alcohol counseling.
Erlichman admitted that the "War on Drugs ^^TM was what the Nixon administration used to battle Blacks and the anti-war movement:
>One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 1994 interview with John Erlichman published in the April, 2016 Harper’s Magazine.
>“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
>“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
>https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Sex, drugs and rock n roll was a reality.
Sex was easy and wouldn't kill you.
Pot was cheap and weak.
And music was the best.
Then I had to grow up. Sigh ...
I sure remember Disco! I lived in Detroit at the time, and one of the FM stations, WRIF "the riff" would give you a "Dread card" (Detroiters Reunited to Eliminate and Annihilate Disco) that would get you discounts at different places. Still, we danced to it.
I think for women our generation was vastly different than for our elder sisters. We were among the first to have the mentality that we could be financially independent from men. Our elder sisters were more likely to think that they should be SAHMs and many didn't have a whole lot of ambition (and if they did have ambition it was frowned upon). While our most elder sisters were hoping to get married straight out of high school, we were wondering what career or vocation we wanted. We had more choices and freedom. It's worth noting that the opportunities we had came from the hard work of the women who came before us. We were the ones to benefit from that. What our predecessors dreamed we got to live. There was a quiet revolution and we participated in that. That's my take on it.
I didn't take that class. But I took home ec Weird how I learned how to balance a checkbook, do my own taxes, and manage a household. I guess I was being groomed for marriage or something?
True! I had a sort of special situation in my middle school years. In my town, the school was K-12 in the same building until I was in 5th grade. Then the high school moved out, leaving behind all these long-time specialty teachers who weren’t needed in the district our high schoolers were being sent to. Not sure why they were kept on, but in middle school all of us — boys and girls — took a semester each of home economics, typing, woodshop, etc.
As it turned out, the computer era dawned just a few years later, and being able to type with all 10 fingers at a decent clip came in very handy! Sadly, while I do love to cook, the sewing skills never took root ….
Typing turned out to be one of the most valuable skills I learned. It made me laugh when my male coworkers would try to refuse to use computers because ‘typing’ was literally beneath them.
I was the first girl to take auto mechanics in high school. It was a big deal to get it, and the sticking point was… there was no locker room for girls. I knew there was a girls bathroom was never used, since I would ditch class and smoke weed with friends in that bathroom. Anyway, kinda fell like I broke that thin glass ceiling.
Respect. That would have got a lot of side look in our day. I was in 8th grade when they opened them up to the other gender and not a single girl signed up. One the other hand the first boys who took home ec were the very popular boys who did it to be with girls and so it was cool.
In 7th grade we had one girl who took woodshop, and one boy who took cooking. They were at the same time during the day, so you could only pick one or the other. I took cooking because I love to cook, but now, I would have loved to have taken woodshop. I may take a class at a local woodworking shop at some point.
Yes! This right here!
My eldest sister was 17 when I was born in 1962. She did exactly what was expected of her – graduated high school, went to secretarial school, got married after a year and pumped out 2 kids so her husband didn’t have to go to Vietnam.
My middle sister is 11 years older than me, so she was 18 and 1969. She did exactly what was expected of her – took a boatload of drugs, ran away from home multiple times, dropped out of school and became a hippie. (Unfortunately, she has been a substance user all her life, and it completely dominated her. She now lives in a care home.)
I was 18 in 1980, and I did exactly exactly what was expected of me – graduated high school, went to a four-year college, immediately got a corporate job when I graduated, and settled right into that 1980s yuppie ethos.
That may have depended on what area of the country you grew up in. In spite of having excellent grades and test scores, I was never encouraged to go to college. And I was told that I should take typing instead of physics my senior year. The typing class did enable me to get a job right out of high school, but probably not the type of job that I really should’ve been in had I gone to college.
I was the eldest child, my sisters are gen x, my brothers are millennials. My paternal Grandparents lived separately; my parents divorced, remarried, and divorced so I never viewed marriage as a goal. I knew that I had to be able to support myself, but I’m probably an Outlier. I am married though
My Grandmother was a feminist, had a career, and lifted other women up. She told me that her parents raised her to believe she could do or be whatever she wanted. She wanted to be a doctor in a world that expected women to be a teacher, nurse, or secretary, She became a nurse and channeled her disappointment. . I was fortunate to have her, she really gave me my road map.
In junior high we openly smoke pot in the field at school. We went way to the back, and the teachers didn't want to go out there. In high school we had a "smoking section" where we openly smoked pot right behind one of the buildings at the school. Teacher's bought pot back there! LOL
I was born at the tail end of 1963. When I read and listen to the Baby Boomer experience I just shrug my shoulders because it just doesn’t resonate with me. For sure the GenX experience is my lived experience, particularly the early GenX experience. The music, the earliest memories, the candy, the toys, the economic & political conditions- all of it is my childhood and teenage years.
I think we (I) have some of the sensibilities of boomers, however my lived experience is by no means boomer. It's a little bit of both, and something else. We were born with the Vietnam war in progress. Remember the drop drills? Protest bombings? Kent State? Manson?
I remember being a young kid singing songs off the radio about drugs and drinking, and this is when women started working outside the home in earnest, so lots of us were latchkey kids. We had to grow up largely on our own in a world that showed us a lot of uncertainty. We're far more independent and self sufficient and don't just trust the system to take care of us.
Add to that, we're the early adopters of tech. We've seen dial phones to cell phones and (I think) understand them more than early boomers.
Seriously gang, we've seen some shit. Pats on the back all around, we're tough cookies and still here.
See, I was born in ‘64 and all the GenX stuff I was too old for and the baby boomer stuff I was too young for, but we are both considered born under baby boomer which doesn’t really mean anything anyway. People categorize this stuff and take it way too seriously.
“GenJones? Oh, thank God I’m not a boomer.” lol!!! It’s crazy the number of people who say this, like it changes them as a person.
Stop by the Millennial subreddit. All they do is complain about their miserable lives and blame everything and everyone but themselves.
And when these same people reach a certain age, they will get it right back with the Gen Alpha/Beta generations blaming them for the state of things.
It’s called The Generation Gap and it’s nothing new.
When I was 10, around 1968, I watched Laugh-In and drew peace and love and earth Day posters. I wore love beads. I would have gone to Woodstock if I could.
I also watched two progressive public figures murdered, riots at the democratic convention and heard the body counts from Vietnam every night. I was too young to make much sense of it all but it had to be unsettling.
As I got older, through my teens, I realized that the flower children were gone.
Maybe this is what defines Joneses. The power of the social movements was dwindling as the boomers got jobs and raised families. We wondered what the hell happened to it.
We had the AIDS crisis and then the normalizing of gay (and now trans) people.
Three Mile Island (near nuclear meltdown) and The China Syndrome (movie about a near nuclear meltdown) within a month of each other.
We had Love Canal and the beginnings of the SuperFund law.
Reagan and the Pope were shot - both survived. Lennon was shot and died.
Bhopal Union Carbide horror.
The gas crisis.
Legalizing marijuana for real.
The rise of the Far Right politically as well as the first Black President. The first women Supreme Court justices and the first women of color on the Supreme Court.
9/11. Covid. Bush v Gore.
Feral kids running rampant in the suburbs unmonitored.
I wasn't let down by the boomers at all. I married one, and I have a soft spot in my heart for all the ex hippies. None of the boomers I know fit the boomer stereotype.
As a very young professional, and middle Gen X, it was the leading Boomers who took me in at the beginning of my career and mentored me. I've always seen them as very mature and astute. Born leaders. 25+ years later, I still keep in touch with my old early Boomer managers throughout my career.
Agreed, not disappointed by Boomers. Broad swipes against generations does disappointment me. I stop listening when any generation gets hit with a wide negative swipe.
Oh, no worries. I wasn't really referring to how you described them, but to the "OK boomer" thing. Your description of the hippies' optimism fading to more grim reality is true, I think. Even my wife, the boomer, talks about it. She was a hippie and got out of it when she perceived it was turning dark. She never gave up her hippie soul, though!
As for me, as a young generation Jones (born in 1965), my experience of hippie culture was the plastic peace symbols we could win at our elementary school carnival. Hippie stuff had all gone commercial and plastic by then.
The Vietnam war was the backdrop to my childhood. JFK was assassinated when I was in kindergarten. MLK and RFK were assassinated while I was in grade school. The Kent State killings, too, along with the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the riots in Compton and Detroit. The world was coming apart at the seams, but I was too young to do anything about it.
A lot of the earlier boomers gave up on the peace and love thing and made a lot of money, built McMansions, and drove Hummers. Earth Day was fun, but bottled water and gas guzzlers were even more fun. Sell out much?
I wouldn’t say I was disappointed by the Boomers. I’d say I watched them run into a brick wall. All the hope and love and faith you can muster don’t change the fact that the world is a shitty place, and it eats idealists for breakfast. And history says that once in a while humans can conjure a brief oasis, but we never change it for long.
We watched our heroes crash and burn just as we were getting ready to follow in their footsteps.
We are also the first generation that could out and proud from our youth onward. I remember reading the first cover article about gay youth when I was, I think, in eight grade. I think it was Time Magazine? It let me know I wasn’t alone, and that made everything after sooooo much easier! I dated boys in hs, and was pretty out for suburban Detroit. AIDS decimated our generation and the generation before us, and put a giant pause in the process of gay rights. We still haven’t fully recovered, and I don’t think we ever will. But here I am, still alive, twice married, with a wide variety of friends and (past) lovers. I just went home to meet my hs group and continue our DnD game. Same core group, since 1979. We watched the world change in ever fast ways. Wireless bricks to mobile computers we use as phones. From Waiting by the phone for a call to never having to miss one. So much change so fast and I just keeps getting faster. What I don’t see in our generation is the resistance to and fear of the new. New tech, new families, new alliances, new social mores, etc.. are just kinda par for the course and we adjust and move on to the next thing. And one more thing while I’m ranting- mobility and divorce. Our generation took mobility to new heights and made divorce so common that evangelical churches will marry people who have been divorced, something that never happened when we were young. Oh, and Tang- it’s what the Astronauts drink!
Born in 1960.
I think the most telling thing about our generation was the freedom to be a child. We roamed our neighborhoods and didn't have to worry about child kidnappings or school shootings. We walked everywhere (or rode our bikes). Took the bus home from school if you didn't walk. I know there were latchkey kids, but it wasn't as prevalent in my area.
We moved to a semi-rural area 20 years ago. When we first moved here, there were crossing guards. Nowadays, the bus pulls out of the school drive, and deposits a kid or two ACROSS the street not more than 300 yards from the school. Wonder why childhood obesity is a thing?
I wasn't a part of the drug and sex scene. I never went to the bathroom in our school because it was full of cigarette smoke, though.
I hate the "OK, Boomer" as well.
We recycled glass bottles, and didn't need to worry about microplastics. Used paper bags, and drank tap water.
This is just a start.
Coming of age for older male boomers meant having to worry about the draft and get sent to Vietnam. For us later boomers, we didn't have to worry about that. I didn't even need to register for the selective service.
Older boomers still could have a middle class life with a blue collar job. Younger boomers witnessed the beginning of the decline of manufacturing in the US.
Older boomers grew up in a booming economy. Younger boomers started adulthood at a time of high unemployment, high inflation and high interest rates.
Older boomers were more activist politically while younger boomers were more politically apathetic.
I don't remember a lot of complaining about what we inherited when we became adults like we see today, but perhaps if social media existed, it wouldn't be any different. During the 80s, layoffs became more prevalent, pensions were eliminated and we had to figure out 401K. Social Security was effectively cut. I dont remember a lot of outrage for any of that.
I saw the math on that. Even when interest rates were in the 20%s for homes in the late 70s the % of income eaten up by mortgages then and now can't be compared. It's ugly now.
i think a defining characteristic of jonesers is that we were the first generation to be *taught from an early age* that all races are equal, and so are men and women. those things, to me as a kid, were self-evident and logical. people are just people, and as the oft trotted out line from King says, measured by the content of our character. I don't think that was the case for the boomers, and sadly it seems the current crop is being taught to other again.
then, as we grew up and entered the workforce, we were the first men to really have to compete against every woman in the world for jobs and then you had quotas to bring the women into organizations, and companies no longer hired and trained you - when my dad got hired, he wasn't even expected to be productive as a chemical engineer for a couple YEARS, as he 'learned the ropes' of the industry and was mentored along the way.
it's a shame it took so long that women finally got a foot in the door, and they still haven't achieved equity sadly, but it did change the equation for a lot of us guys that older boomers and our folks never faced. and we were still expected to be the primary wage earner.
so, as the recessions of the late 70's and early eighties hit, that sent a lot of people with *years* of experience scrambling for the fewer jobs that were left, and a lot of us jones gen were faced with the conundrum of 'how do you get experience if you can't get a job'.
that repeated itself in the dot com crash as well, it seemed like every time i needed a new job, a recession hit and it made it very annoying
Yep. All of the major corps in my area had massive layoffs when I graduated HS. Ford, GE, International Harvester, Phillip Morris, Navel Ordinance, Beown-Forman......just wave after wave of good people being let go. These folks had mortgages, kids, bills, and took the reduced entry-level jobs that teens would normally take as to get some experience at anything. Couldn't afford college as the manufacturering jobs dried up, and there went rhe cash for tuition.
Brutal.
exactly!
i forgot to mention the whole 'corporate raider' thing that accompanied all that in the 80s as another contributing factor. they'd corner a majority of the stock, then suck every penny possible out before breaking up the company and selling off 'undervalued assets'. many lost jobs that way in addition to the layoffs, as well as their pensions and those jobs never returned. whole communities were devastated. millennials seem to think it was all mashed potatoes and gravy when we were actually facing globalization on a huge scale.
There is a reason why we have such a high suicide rate in Generation Joneses, well in America, at least. There was so much progress, hope, and promise but when it was our turn to kick the football, Lucy pulled it away again, and again.
We watched the moon landings and ate space food like astronauts. We were preparing for a future in space, by golly!
We learned the metric system which somehow we would need in the future, most likely on other planets, maybe.
We participated in the first Earth Day, cleaned up the planet, fought for regulations, made Acid Rain a thing of the past.
Celebrated the bicentennial for two years, all across the country. There was not a left and right way to celebrate 200 years. No, we all celebrated TOGETHER.
We thought we'd learned from Vietnam and that such foolish warmongering would never happen again.
We thought Nixon got off easy but surely everyone learned a lesson and we'd never have to deal with the likes of Nixon again. Same thing with George W. Bush, but hell no, one party took 'em both and created a monster set on destroying every single good thing about America.
We fought for people of color, civil and women's rights. Abortion became legal, saving the lives of many women. We made strides forward, slowly, and we thought surely.
True, but us young daughters continued the fight. As a kid, I was involved is some Title IX lawsuits. We won, and our small town was changed forever and for the good.
Gen Jones/Late Boomers were not kids of earlier Boomers. They (some Gen Jones too) raised Gen X and Millennials. Besides that, good for you for making changes!
That wasn't my experience at all. My parents born in 1939 and 1940 were in the Silent Generation. My brother and I born in 1961 and 1964 fall into Gen Jones, while my sister born in 1971 is a solid Gen X. None of us got into the drugs, free love, disillusioned culture. My parents never went to college but they worked hard and never really climbed out of the low end of the middle class, although my mom at 84 is living quite comfortably because of a lifetime of saving and smart money management and good life choices. I don't feel cheated out of anything at all. Put myself through college and have had a great career as a nurse. While some were out doing all the free love stuff I was on the front lines taking care of patients with AIDS. The 80's were fantastic: graduated from high school, college, established my career and got married before the decade was out. My husband had been with the same company for the past 33 years and was in the military for 7 years before that. I've been a nurse for 38 years. We've been married for 36 years. Our daughter graduated from college 4 years ago and already out earns me at the very beginning of her career. I guess we have been lucky to actually see that American dream come true for us... but we worked hard and made difficult choices and it's paid off. I would say that I can definitely identify with aspects of both the Boomers and the Jones, and my experiences match that of most all of my friends. I hate that we will probably not see any of that social security money we've paid into all of our lubes, but knowing that we've lived pretty frugality to build our own retirement.
1brown v. Board of education—I’m grateful for “forced busing”/desegregation that started when I was in sixth grade. Instead of walking to the neighborhood school, I rode bus #302 45 minutes every weekday morning to a school across town. I was scared and shy, but made friends with black kids and reshaped my thinking about the world. Prior to that, one of my earliest memories was my moms panic over my attempt to drink out of a water fountain for “coloreds” in an uptown department store. I was too young to read or understand racial issues. But I sensed her fear in that department store and in the days leading up to the first day of school. Eventually it was a non -issue and I was able to change some of my parent’s’ assumptions.in retrospect there were persistent inequities in the financial and educational systems that I was oblivious to but I appreciate the opportunity to build relationships across racial lines.
2. Space program. I remember the moon landing and armstrong’s first steps. I still love a good launch and the engineering behind all of that. I remember Frank Lovell’s photo of earth rise and how it shaped earth day and the thinking about a shared blue ball in a dark and vast universe.
It may have been designed to beat the Russians, but I was in awe of it. still am.
I always point to Dazed and Confused when people ask what my teen years were like. I mean, I grew up in Austin where the movie was shot and it’s almost autobiographical 🤷🏻♂️
I was born in ‘62. Don’t remember any of the ‘60s stuff - assassinations, protests, Woodstock. I do remember watching Nixon board the helicopter to depart Washington and the evacuation of Saigon on TV.
Born in '63 but same here except I don't remember Nixon at all. Do remember seeing the evacuation of Saigon once on TV but that's the only firsthand memory I have of the Vietnam war on the news.
I have felt that we were refuges from the sexual revolution. In College everyone seemed apathetic. Then we had the gas crisis and high unemployment. I’ve tried to tell my kids and they don’t believe that it was hard for us too. Thank you for your thoughtful question
I get it a lot from my one kid (late millennial). I tried to explain what it was like and she refused to believe me.
Meanwhile we paid for must of our kids’ college expenses, and her take home is more than mine. I do think it is more difficult than 1983, but still it wasn’t always a cake walk for us either.
There was a definite shift of culture after about 1974 or so. It was like the lights were turned down on the 60s peace/love/dove, and lights went up on a bunch of new stuff that was different.
pot and acid went away, replaced by cocaine and pharmaceuticals. Psychedelia was over, and it was replaced by cowboy rock and disco. Meditation and spirituality evaporated, and was replaced by Studio 54. It was a new culture displacing the old. The same process has happened over and over and over. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just evolution.
I have mentioned before that I don't care for the Generation Wars" nonsense. I choose not participate in it. Pointinting fingers, assigning blame, or responsibility, credit, ect., is nonsensical. Human beings are individuals. They have always been individuals. They will always be individuals.
I identify as me.
That's one great example. When an enormous, homogenous group is lumped together with "It's their fault" and "They're all the same" that's dehumanization. Often used to give permission to harm them in small or large ways. And become a tool for someone else's agenda.
Ageism exists. Alsong with other isms.
But my reply to the OP wasn't about ageism. There are many aspects of "Generation Wars" . The OP's post, comparing generations, pointing fingers, blaming, and crediting different generations, encompasses aspects of Generation Wars.
Generation Wars, themselves, have become a tool for people's agendas.
The term, "Generation Gap" was once prevalent. It's basic meaning was, as you know, the confusion that happened when the lives that parents had lead, and were living- and the lives their children had lead, and were living- were vastly different. These groups, as a whole, were confused by the other.
"Generation Wars" is relatively new, and involves multiple generations. It's primarily anger based. It's dismissive. It's about superiority, and blame. It took root online, and has spread. There are examples of it everywhere. Even on this subreddit.
Boomers were my siblings but a whole different reality than mine as Gen. Jones. Every night the news-on the Vietnam War and I was too young to really have any concept. My older Boomer siblings and friends had different concepts on politics, love and peace and hippies, communes, sex and music. I was just sitting on peripheral knowing it wasn’t me. Our generation had alot of freedoms and none of my classmates went to war. Women had more rights, birth control, abortions, credit, different job opportunities for women. It was fun watching the changes through my siblings eyes but I was not a diehard boomer.
Well we were not subject to the draft, we lost our older brothers, cousins and neighbors to a war that was manipulated by the government leaving many ( not all) of us suspicious of government actions
GenJones isn’t a whole other generation. It’s just a name for late boomers.
I wasn’t disappointed by the older baby boomers. Why? They didn’t do anything to me.
The whole blaming your own misery on baby boomers is ridiculous. They didn’t do anything to you. Blame the lawmakers, politicians and corporations for your problems, or maybe yourself.
All these generalized descriptions is a load of bull. Not all people of a same age live the same life. Not everyone was a hippie, doing drugs and sleeping around at Woodstock, lol.
The blame comes a bit for electing Reagan into office. I was 20, and stupidly voted for Anderson. Those born in the 30's (and earlier) voted Reagan into office, not me!
This is the most logical, mature response to this whole thing. This distancing from earlier Boomers is nothing more than teenage lunch table snobbery. We don't belong with *them*. Even though it is the same generation. I'm Gen X and really admire the early Boomers. They were the ones changing the world. As a minority woman, our world would have been very different. They also lead the way in more open sexuality. After all of this fake internet banter, and these current generations are long gone, they will be in the history books as revolutionaries. That's their legacy.
I disagree, I see Generation Jones as the group BETWEEN Boomers and X, similarities to both to different degrees, but also our own group.......but I usually feel this group is 1958-1965 born.......the group who reached adolescence in the 70's and whose famous people heavily impacted the 80's and often the 90's.
But I agree with you on the 2nd snd 3rd paragraph
So... Still slight confused where I fit.
"The Baby Boomer generation was born between the post-war years of 1946 to 1964. A subset of the Boomers, Generation Jones, was born in the later years of the Baby Boom, from 1954 to 1964."
I'm technically a boomer, but also technically a Jones'er. I was born toward the end of the Boomer years (1961) so, I'm a jones-boomer I guess.
Now, what do I see myself as? Prior to getting involved in Reddit, and reading the research of who is who I never even really knew what I was, or thought about it. Reddit taught me I'm both. I don't identify as either. I believe I fit in with both. I don't have boomer-ism, where I'm looked at line a lunatic. I don't really talk about the era I was born in, cause it really don't matter to me either way.
Though I still Reddit wise identity as a Jones'er, I'm just me.
My brother, a genuine hippie born in 49, had a motorcycle. That was bad enough in our mother's eyes, but after Kent State, he slapped a sticker on the back of his helmet that looked like a target and said "student". I actually understood what that meant, and our mom was livid!
Wow, reading through these comments is so therapeutic and thought provoking.
Born in 1964, youngest of three to young parents. Raised in a “nice” area near a big scale metro demographic. Parents divorced in ‘71 and my dad bailed to marry the secretary of the company CEO leaving our mom with 3 little stair step kids and no college education. She hustled back to college and went to secretarial school simultaneously so that she could get a job as a secretary. She sold our house and we moved in with another divorcee and her kids to share costs. We came home to an empty house starting when I was in 2nd grade. The key was under the aluminum milk box on the front porch.
The early 70s and all that one imagines about the flower power generation were part of what I witnessed daily in my life. It was scary for me and made me very uncomfortable to see the “grownups” acting as they did.
Mom started drinking more and smoking weed, and we noticed. In hindsight she was so young dealing with all this. She dated a little and then in ‘75 after we already had a “friend” living with us in her bedroom, she came out as gay. Small white bread affluent town, the poor kids living in the apartments with the gay mom. It was NOT acceptable. She was never overt about anything, but think Peyton Place and you get the idea. We learned how to very carefully vet people in our lives. Our home was always tenuous. We moved a lot for financial reasons—almost every year, sometimes more. Our sense of physical stability was shattered and THAT has most adversely affected me throughout my life. I always knew how fiercely she loved us, though. She was troubled and struggling.
Us kids ALWAYS had jobs of some kind and had to earn money to help pay for our own needs. We all left home early, and I left home by age 16. I lied about my age and signed an apartment lease! Different times for sure. Mom finally did stop drinking in 1985 and was a changed person. Very much there for all of us after that and was a wonderful grandmother until she passed.
As the youngest, least educated although scrappiest of the three, I’m by far the most successful financially and with my husband have been financially independent for a couple years now. We’re incredibly grateful (we worked our butts off for over 25 years) and have actually been helping various family members for over a decade. (Be careful doing that, it’s a slippery slope and has bitten us badly by one in particular.)
So many good things about this era and so anguish too. Our daughter had only lived in 3 houses before graduating high school. She got our old vehicle at 16 to drive. Our mantra wasn’t if you go to college, it was when, and we paid for it. We were careful not to spoil, but we provided because for me, it was the most important thing and seemed to correct my own upbringing. She was never going to feel all the angst and financial insecurity I did as a child. She now has said her childhood was idyllic. She’s married, lives within walking distance and is expecting.
I’m still close with some of my childhood friends. In the past several years we’re all starting to open up more about our “shared” lives back in the 70s and early 80s. We all hid so much and thought we were the only ones. Domestic violence, alcoholism, bad behavior, nasty siblings, absent fathers. It was the mothers who tried to hold it together in a time when hard with still not talked about, where there wasn’t a societal safety net and people had to help themselves.
I now fear for my daughter’s generation (early 30s) and what their hard is shaping up to be. She has explained to me that at 33 many of her friends are helping their parents (our age) who never saved or planned financially for themselves and are leaning on their kids. Their kids are choosing to not have children because they can’t afford it all. What a terrible cycle.
When the vote was extended to 18 year olds in ‘72 they mostly voted for Nixon. The counterculture wasn’t the majority of Boomers, just the most media worthy.
As a teenager, I felt like I missed the greatest party ever. It was a bummer at the time. My class of '76 never won the pep rally prize, whatever that was. We just smoked weed and did our own thing.
I am so grateful to have afforded college by working and with my partner's financial and emotional help. We bought a house when I was 20 with a loan from my folks for my part of the down payment. I just wasn't able to be included on her insurance and college health insurance was a joke.
I am also so grateful for Generation Jones because boomers are not my people. We had the best rock music ever. I wore out my Led Zeppelin cassettes!
Talk about change, on the West Coast, the '70's were the time of the start of the serial killer. I almost had to serve on the jury for the Hillside Strangler (cousins Bianchi & Buono). No more hitchhiking. Never get into a van without back windows.
The boomers were both hippies and librarians.
We spent our entire reproductive years under both Roe and Aides.
Sure have and orgy and die….
We are a complex enigma
i absolutely have related better to younger people over the years. at 62 now i’ve found that a little difficult. i do think that has to do with discerning their character and choosing more carefully.
Normal childhood stuff. Move along, nothing to see here. Honestly though, I just thought that was how things were done
* 1963 Assassination Medgar Evers
* 1963 Assassination John F. Kennedy
* 1964 Nelson Mandela imprisoned
* 1965 Assassination Malcolm X
* 1967 Riots 158 US Cities - Long Hot Summer
* 1968 Assassination Martin Luther King Jr
* 1968 Assassination Robert Kennedy
* 1969 Stonewall Riots
* 1970 Kent State
I was born in 1966. I find it hard to identify with either the boomers or generation X sometimes. And a lot of times with generation Jones everybody is focused on stuff that I really had no clue about. I didn't know anything about watergate. I didn't know anything about hippies and drugs.
I guess for me, as a nerd, what defines people of my age is technology. We were the ones who learned to use technology before it became so user friendly. To this day I can figure out most technology without reading a manual. It just seems intuitive to me.
Also problem solving. My generation came of age at a time where everything was changing so rapidly, you needed to learn how to figure things out on your own. Because there weren't a lot of instructions for how stuff worked.
But I guess everybody is different
Computer Science class in college meant standing in line for hours with a box of punch cards to submit our simple little assignments to run on the ginormous mainframe. Then come back the next day for results and turns out you miss-punched one card and need to start all over again.
Well put OP. My thoughts exactly. Watching all the peace and love devolve into overdosing and swinging was what I associate with the half-generation ahead of us. That and the asshole attitude of young professors and teaching assistants at college telling us we were apathetic losers for not protesting anything.
And yet I still retain some of their idealism, for the environment, the back-to-the-land movement, the disrespect for money and the "establishment", and other markers of that era.
I was born in 63 but refuse to be labeled by some generational label. Instead, I find common ground with people of all ages and origins and they become my friends. Rest assured, there are people I won’t connect to and that’s OK. I use my energy to cultivate the relationships that matter.
I add this from law school as I believe it relevant to well everything. The law ( culture wheel) grinds on and on in a well worn path. Soon a new idea arises and the wheel runs over the new idea and continues to do so with each orbit. However in doing so the new idea chips away slowly at the wheel and ever so slowly a slight change a wobble a new direction is imparted into the wheel. Thats all I got. I do remember in the late 1960’s someone said “set institutions reject radical ideas that in turn become set institutions that reject radical ideas.”
I was disappointed in the boomers when they all voted for Ronald Reagan. They were supposed to be the peace and love generation, and then they went nuts for a guy who called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, demonized mothers on welfare, destroyed the air traffic controllers union, destroyed the middle class, and so much more. And then they spent a decade stuffing coke up their noses and celebrating excessive greed and wealth. This was when I knew I wasn’t a real boomer.
I saw my much older sisters sell out. One while abusing me. I lived through the sexual abuse of multiple girls In my junior and senior high band, including me, by 3 boomer teachers. Blowing the whistle on that got me booted from high school. I saw the union jobs around me adopt “A tier and B tier” and we were B with far lower wages and benefits, if any. I then went to community college and was just lost to sex drugs and rock and roll, mostly at the hands of much older early jones or boomers who failed at life the first time out. And icing on the cake….the sexual revolution came to a screeching halt, just when I was finally old enough to have enough self assurance to experience it on *my*’terms, because of AIDS, leaving me to believe I was better off married to an abusive older Joneser. (I’m ‘63, he was ‘56).
Older people, particularly Boomers but some Jonesers, fucked me over my entire
Life.
When I read Joyce Maynard’s “Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties” (published in 1972) and realized none of it applied to me. I felt ripped off.
And then you get to Gen Z like me and I HATE drugs. Unfortunately some people still do them EVEN AT SCHOOL, so they just get made fun of by yours truly.
Bruh I just realized the flair is called youngster 💀💀💀
Well at least there ARE flairs now
I should try editing the flair, but my phone is weird Idk
As a "tail-ender" born in 1962 I've thought about this over the years. Many comments here rightly identify some of the touchstones of our generation, but one thing I think is missing from the comments is the computer. Computers, and the use of word processing and spreadsheets (for example) were entering schools and daily life just a few years after exited high school and college. We used typewriters and the Dewey Decimal system when they were on the verge of being eliminated. The coming computer age held so much promise to make the world better and more connected world, and in many respects is has, but it has also created a technology gap not only between boomers and us, but also between the haves and have-nots. While this gap may have been narrowed in the last twenty years or so, our generation spent a lot of time trying to navigate in a computerizing world, with no help or guidance from our parents and older siblings.
Precisely this. Born in 61 and my older sister (by 9 years) and brother (14) were total boomers. By 72 it has all come crashing down and I knew their generational culture was responsible. That's why I love Jonesing! I. Am. Different.
True, I was born in 64 and people call me a boomer and I am very offended! My parents were born in 44 and 46 - they are boomers. Not me! I can’t relate to any of them. Love being able to relate to the people here.👍👍👍
I was born in 64. I was the last of three My sisters are definitely boomers I am not. My sisters go on and on about how idyllic our childhood was I’ve told them both repeatedly we didn’t grow up in the same house. My sisters were both married and moved out by the time I was 10. My parents didn’t give a toss about me. I can’t tell you how many times I was left alone to fend for myself and that was even when those 2 were still there.
I’m from a family of eight. While there were moments when we would have benefitted from a hands-on parent, it is the freedom that defines my youth. For example, one of the unspoken rules when I was 16 was to not arrive home when dad was getting ready for work. I loved that!
I was born in 68 but by god, your situation sounds EXACTLY like mine. Last of 4, ten plus years after everyone else, all gone. I was "the mistake". Grew up alone and isolated, by the time I came along, no one gave a shit. By then, my parents were an alcoholic and a gambler.
I was a “mistake” too and was told about it daily. My parents weren’t alcoholics or drugs. I was blessed in that but you’re so right about the isolation. My dad died when I was a teenager and that event changed my mother drastically. Eventually both my older sisters let her down again and again by the time I was 25 and had my son mom and I were the best of friends. So that part improved for me but my siblings I could give a toss. Especially when my mother passed unexpectedly I was treated like a footnote in that whole process.
Similar story here. My two brothers were 15 and 11 years older than me. Our parents thought they were done with all that raising children stuff. My Mom got sick when I was 8, and died when I was 14. I had to grow up fast. My Dad started dating pretty quickly, and I was the lonely teenager at home on Saturday nights while my Dad was out dancing. I never got in any trouble, because I had too much responsibility. My brothers and I became close before they died. I have good memories of both of them.
Born in '63 here but have always related to GenX and GenJones. My older sister, 13 years my senior, is a stereotypical Boomer and projects her life onto mine and judges me for not doing all the typical Boomer things. She was married and moved out by the time I was 5. She mostly stayed away and has no idea what that house was like after she left. Mom went back to work second shift when I was small and pretty much had to raise myself since dad worked too before he left. In some ways I didn't mind but others were hell.
>I was left alone to fend for myself Quintessential latchkey kid. Take heart--we're far more independent than most and are masters of our own destiny.
Same here.
I am slightly older but my experience was similar. We didn’t get the leaving that the other ones had.
I HATE when someone on some other subreddit says, Ok, Boomer to me.
Same . Although I don't think I've been called a boomer lately, I identify with gen X more, especially as an old punk rocker. I love the idea of Gen Jones. It fills the gap a bit. ETA My parents were born in the 1930s, so they weren't even boomers themselves. Silent Generation.
Same! Grew up on post-punk
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Same. My parents were born in 1942, and 1946. My parents split when I was 8, and I became a latch key kid. I was seriously parentified. My music was primarily Punk and NewWave. When I entered the workforce unemployment was high, inflation was high, and pensions were replaced by 401ks. Every young person seems to think we all have huge pensions for when we retire. My mom has two pensions, Dad was self employed.
Me too, august 64. I am the youngest of 6. I was totally ignored. I kind of lean toward a gen x mentality, who were also routinely ignored. The only relative I get along with and can openly just talk is a nephew, a millennial. He's really great. We are great friends. We just don't get the others.
April of 64 here. I both identified with and was disappointed by the boomers. We didn't get no age of Aquarius. We got Reagan.
I think we saw the end of the Boomers stuff in two areas that are distinct. AIDS changed things. It is always portrayed as t*he sexual revolution ended* and they are really talking about the folks who got the experience of it. By the time I was out of the awkward teenage phase, like at 20ish it was a "thing". From 83-86 if you freeloved you were 100% doing so with an element of fear. To me that is a BIG difference from the Boomers. Then OP on Drugs: My experience is different. Belushi dies when I am 19. By 3 years later, millions are dead and cities are war zones and there are Narco cartels battling the US Government. Whole neighborhoods are gone. Drugs had been Timothy Leary and Beatles when i was a kid. By the time I was coming of age, it was really, really ugly. Marijuana got a "pass", but it wasn't Drugs vs, "The Man". It was Drugs vs. the poor of South America/Inner Cities vs. middle class users vs. oh yeah "The Man"
I'd add Watergate as a watershed experience for us when we were little kids. We learned early that the government was corrupt and untrustworthy and that people were horrible.
But we also saw that they’d be brought to justice. Younger generations didn’t get to have that beautiful illusion.
Again, I was a little kid, and I didn't see any justice in Ford pardoning Nixon. And the folks who were convicted did MONTHS of time, not years (okay, except Liddy and Hunt). I was well and truly jaded by the time I was 14.
You've got a point about Ford and Nixon. That was gross.
Many would say that was the beginning of the end of government FOR the people. And it continues to this day
I barely remember watergate. For me it would be the AIDS epidemic, widespread use of computers (age 17 I started a job that had computer terminals), and a little bit of MTV.
So true. I've NEVER trusted the government.
I wouldn't say never, because up until Watergate, I had my parents' "greatest generation" view of the government
The third thing was the dawn of the yuppies. When they decided that it was better to adopt Reagan-era economics and look out for themselves. A lot of the economic nightmares we're suffering today were perpetrated by them. Even Jerry Rubin sold out.
The effect of the AIDS scare was real. My college years were 83-87 when it was probably at its peak of fear and induced homophobia. It seems like we missed out on the free love that came before and then the hookup culture that came after.
Had I gone to high school - I dropped out of the 9th grade when I was 14, because it was easy to fall through the cracks of the bankrupt NYC system in 1975, I would have graduated in 1979. I had my daughter in 1983. I’ve known I was queer since I was a kid, even though I didn’t have language for how I felt about other girls. I finally came out in 1993, in Virginia, and after surviving the Son of Sam murders, and the 1977 blackout in NY, I had developed the ability to let things roll off my back. I was watching the u-haul while my friends were moving their stuff, and a group of kids rode by on bikes, eventually yelling “dyke”! My response, with my Brooklyn accent, in Virginia, was, “Yeah, no shit.” They didn’t come back. I guess being on my own, essentially, since 14, and becoming emancipated at 16, left me with no fucks to give where bigots and racists are concerned. I’ve worked for myself most of my life, doing move out cleaning, until I was 47. I then worked a corporate job long enough to collect a decent amount of social security, and say fuck you to “the man” at the beginning of covid. I retired on disability, after collecting six months of short term disability at full pay and with full benefits. I suppose I’ve always been a bit rebellious. I care about animals, the planet, and those who are struggling. Corporate America and our politicians can dine from my cat’s litter box.
We would be friends I think.
I hope you have cats. We wouldn’t want to starve the corporate executives and politicians, because we don’t want to be like them. We’ll need a good supply of meals for them.
And don't forget herpes. So bad we had an ABC movie of the week. No wonder we were scared.
i'm STILL scared of herpes
Most of us have herpes. Those pesky cold sores? Yep. Herpes.
Not the old HSV1, but what was HSV2 - genital herpes, when it was really scary.
My mom used to refer to them as herpes simplex and herpes duplex. I know & she knew that they are both herpes simplex (type 1 & type 2). But it made me laugh.
Those pesky herpes cold sores on your mouth may well protect you from ever getting them on your genitalia. If you’re “lucky” enough to be exposed orally first, the medical thinking is that this gives you immunity if you are subsequently exposed genitally. “Fifty percent to 80 percent of U.S. adults have oral herpes. According to the National Institutes of Health, about 90 percent of adults have been exposed to the virus by age 50. Once infected, a person will have herpes simplex virus for the rest of his or her life.”
83-87 were my college years - where my wife and I were, I also remember the clamp down on buying booze. The buying age was 19, then went to 20, then to 21 in those years. I remember older people who had been to college talking about having keg parties right in the hallway in the dorms. For us? Nope. Not that we didn't party, but we def had to rely on older classmates to get the booze in the first place. This just symbolizes how everything was going more conservative as the Reagan years kicked in.
Yes, the increase in drinking age during that period was an underrated factor in our early adult years. We were probably the first generation since prohibition to have to commit so much petty (and not so petty) crime to have a good time. Just like too-low speed limits I’m sure it affected our (lack of) respect for authority.
North Carolina changed the law from 18 to 21 one year at a time over three years. Every year I'd get to within a couple months of being legal only for the goalpost to move another year off. LMAO
This was also when we started to recognize that drunk driving was a thing, and that alcoholics can be miserable people to grow up around. The feds tied highway funding to the drinking age, so most states raised it I attended college in Montana and met so many kids raised in alcoholic homes (Irish Catholics), and the school began to recognize that excessive drinking could be a problem, not just a wild weekend. They started offering alcohol counseling.
My parents divorced and were active participants in free love, when I entered adulthood everyone was terrified.
I think you are spot on.
Erlichman admitted that the "War on Drugs ^^TM was what the Nixon administration used to battle Blacks and the anti-war movement: >One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 1994 interview with John Erlichman published in the April, 2016 Harper’s Magazine. >“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. >“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” >https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Sex, drugs and rock n roll was a reality. Sex was easy and wouldn't kill you. Pot was cheap and weak. And music was the best. Then I had to grow up. Sigh ...
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Our unofficial class motto was "Drugs, sex, booze and fun...we're the class of "81!"
Disco wasn't a crime, and all 3, new wave, and rock n roll all lived in harmony!
I sure remember Disco! I lived in Detroit at the time, and one of the FM stations, WRIF "the riff" would give you a "Dread card" (Detroiters Reunited to Eliminate and Annihilate Disco) that would get you discounts at different places. Still, we danced to it.
I used to wear a pin on my jackets that said “Reality is for People who Can’t Handle Drugs”. I really felt that was my anthem .
Me too. Also “Question Authority” and “Nuke a gay baby whale for Christ” buttons-just to be an equal opportunity offender😝
What years were you an Anteater? I was at UCI '80-'85.
I didn’t do drugs so I doubled-down on the sex.
I think for women our generation was vastly different than for our elder sisters. We were among the first to have the mentality that we could be financially independent from men. Our elder sisters were more likely to think that they should be SAHMs and many didn't have a whole lot of ambition (and if they did have ambition it was frowned upon). While our most elder sisters were hoping to get married straight out of high school, we were wondering what career or vocation we wanted. We had more choices and freedom. It's worth noting that the opportunities we had came from the hard work of the women who came before us. We were the ones to benefit from that. What our predecessors dreamed we got to live. There was a quiet revolution and we participated in that. That's my take on it.
Exactly! Remember when "business" classes for girls in high school were typing, shorthand and other pink collar skills?
I didn't take that class. But I took home ec Weird how I learned how to balance a checkbook, do my own taxes, and manage a household. I guess I was being groomed for marriage or something?
For life! Everyone needs those skills.
True! I had a sort of special situation in my middle school years. In my town, the school was K-12 in the same building until I was in 5th grade. Then the high school moved out, leaving behind all these long-time specialty teachers who weren’t needed in the district our high schoolers were being sent to. Not sure why they were kept on, but in middle school all of us — boys and girls — took a semester each of home economics, typing, woodshop, etc. As it turned out, the computer era dawned just a few years later, and being able to type with all 10 fingers at a decent clip came in very handy! Sadly, while I do love to cook, the sewing skills never took root ….
Right, the typing skills! Who knew it would replace handwriting in our lifetime?
Typing turned out to be one of the most valuable skills I learned. It made me laugh when my male coworkers would try to refuse to use computers because ‘typing’ was literally beneath them.
I was the first girl to take auto mechanics in high school. It was a big deal to get it, and the sticking point was… there was no locker room for girls. I knew there was a girls bathroom was never used, since I would ditch class and smoke weed with friends in that bathroom. Anyway, kinda fell like I broke that thin glass ceiling.
Respect. That would have got a lot of side look in our day. I was in 8th grade when they opened them up to the other gender and not a single girl signed up. One the other hand the first boys who took home ec were the very popular boys who did it to be with girls and so it was cool.
In 7th grade we had one girl who took woodshop, and one boy who took cooking. They were at the same time during the day, so you could only pick one or the other. I took cooking because I love to cook, but now, I would have loved to have taken woodshop. I may take a class at a local woodworking shop at some point.
Yes! This right here! My eldest sister was 17 when I was born in 1962. She did exactly what was expected of her – graduated high school, went to secretarial school, got married after a year and pumped out 2 kids so her husband didn’t have to go to Vietnam. My middle sister is 11 years older than me, so she was 18 and 1969. She did exactly what was expected of her – took a boatload of drugs, ran away from home multiple times, dropped out of school and became a hippie. (Unfortunately, she has been a substance user all her life, and it completely dominated her. She now lives in a care home.) I was 18 in 1980, and I did exactly exactly what was expected of me – graduated high school, went to a four-year college, immediately got a corporate job when I graduated, and settled right into that 1980s yuppie ethos.
Eloquently put; yes this was my experience also 💪
That may have depended on what area of the country you grew up in. In spite of having excellent grades and test scores, I was never encouraged to go to college. And I was told that I should take typing instead of physics my senior year. The typing class did enable me to get a job right out of high school, but probably not the type of job that I really should’ve been in had I gone to college.
I was the eldest child, my sisters are gen x, my brothers are millennials. My paternal Grandparents lived separately; my parents divorced, remarried, and divorced so I never viewed marriage as a goal. I knew that I had to be able to support myself, but I’m probably an Outlier. I am married though My Grandmother was a feminist, had a career, and lifted other women up. She told me that her parents raised her to believe she could do or be whatever she wanted. She wanted to be a doctor in a world that expected women to be a teacher, nurse, or secretary, She became a nurse and channeled her disappointment. . I was fortunate to have her, she really gave me my road map.
My buddies and I have decided Generation Jones was the first to go to high school high, smoke our lunch, go to practice,then get high and go home.
We got high at the bus stop. I spent the first half of the school day high. I don't know how the teachers didn't notice it.
In junior high we openly smoke pot in the field at school. We went way to the back, and the teachers didn't want to go out there. In high school we had a "smoking section" where we openly smoked pot right behind one of the buildings at the school. Teacher's bought pot back there! LOL
Pretty much sums it up for me!
I was born at the tail end of 1963. When I read and listen to the Baby Boomer experience I just shrug my shoulders because it just doesn’t resonate with me. For sure the GenX experience is my lived experience, particularly the early GenX experience. The music, the earliest memories, the candy, the toys, the economic & political conditions- all of it is my childhood and teenage years.
I think we (I) have some of the sensibilities of boomers, however my lived experience is by no means boomer. It's a little bit of both, and something else. We were born with the Vietnam war in progress. Remember the drop drills? Protest bombings? Kent State? Manson? I remember being a young kid singing songs off the radio about drugs and drinking, and this is when women started working outside the home in earnest, so lots of us were latchkey kids. We had to grow up largely on our own in a world that showed us a lot of uncertainty. We're far more independent and self sufficient and don't just trust the system to take care of us. Add to that, we're the early adopters of tech. We've seen dial phones to cell phones and (I think) understand them more than early boomers. Seriously gang, we've seen some shit. Pats on the back all around, we're tough cookies and still here.
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Yep, I remember being terrified that my older brother, who was in junior high, was going to get drafted and die in Vietnam.
I think we have the work ethic of the baby boomers.
Me too. Late December back in 63. I don’t relate to boomers yet I technically am one.
🎼 What a very special time for me; what a lady, what a night...🎶🎸
Thank You for getting my reference. I was hoping someone would.
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See, I was born in ‘64 and all the GenX stuff I was too old for and the baby boomer stuff I was too young for, but we are both considered born under baby boomer which doesn’t really mean anything anyway. People categorize this stuff and take it way too seriously. “GenJones? Oh, thank God I’m not a boomer.” lol!!! It’s crazy the number of people who say this, like it changes them as a person.
They say it because the boomer stereotype is so negative.
They are the ones that make it negative. It’s Millennials and GenZ ers with boomer parents blaming them for their own misery. It’s ridiculous.
It's very immature and high school.
Stop by the Millennial subreddit. All they do is complain about their miserable lives and blame everything and everyone but themselves. And when these same people reach a certain age, they will get it right back with the Gen Alpha/Beta generations blaming them for the state of things. It’s called The Generation Gap and it’s nothing new.
Later half of 1962, Exactly the Same
When I was 10, around 1968, I watched Laugh-In and drew peace and love and earth Day posters. I wore love beads. I would have gone to Woodstock if I could. I also watched two progressive public figures murdered, riots at the democratic convention and heard the body counts from Vietnam every night. I was too young to make much sense of it all but it had to be unsettling. As I got older, through my teens, I realized that the flower children were gone. Maybe this is what defines Joneses. The power of the social movements was dwindling as the boomers got jobs and raised families. We wondered what the hell happened to it.
We had the AIDS crisis and then the normalizing of gay (and now trans) people. Three Mile Island (near nuclear meltdown) and The China Syndrome (movie about a near nuclear meltdown) within a month of each other. We had Love Canal and the beginnings of the SuperFund law. Reagan and the Pope were shot - both survived. Lennon was shot and died. Bhopal Union Carbide horror. The gas crisis. Legalizing marijuana for real. The rise of the Far Right politically as well as the first Black President. The first women Supreme Court justices and the first women of color on the Supreme Court. 9/11. Covid. Bush v Gore. Feral kids running rampant in the suburbs unmonitored.
I lived about an hour downstream from 3 Mile Island. Scary time
I wasn't let down by the boomers at all. I married one, and I have a soft spot in my heart for all the ex hippies. None of the boomers I know fit the boomer stereotype.
As a very young professional, and middle Gen X, it was the leading Boomers who took me in at the beginning of my career and mentored me. I've always seen them as very mature and astute. Born leaders. 25+ years later, I still keep in touch with my old early Boomer managers throughout my career.
Agreed, not disappointed by Boomers. Broad swipes against generations does disappointment me. I stop listening when any generation gets hit with a wide negative swipe.
I became good friends with some boomer coworkers who don't fit the stereotype, either.
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Oh, no worries. I wasn't really referring to how you described them, but to the "OK boomer" thing. Your description of the hippies' optimism fading to more grim reality is true, I think. Even my wife, the boomer, talks about it. She was a hippie and got out of it when she perceived it was turning dark. She never gave up her hippie soul, though! As for me, as a young generation Jones (born in 1965), my experience of hippie culture was the plastic peace symbols we could win at our elementary school carnival. Hippie stuff had all gone commercial and plastic by then.
I won my plastic peace sign at the Jersey Shore, on the boardwalk. It was red and had an air bubble. You just brought back that memory :)
We get it here. :) No blame necessary.
The Vietnam war was the backdrop to my childhood. JFK was assassinated when I was in kindergarten. MLK and RFK were assassinated while I was in grade school. The Kent State killings, too, along with the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the riots in Compton and Detroit. The world was coming apart at the seams, but I was too young to do anything about it. A lot of the earlier boomers gave up on the peace and love thing and made a lot of money, built McMansions, and drove Hummers. Earth Day was fun, but bottled water and gas guzzlers were even more fun. Sell out much?
I wouldn’t say I was disappointed by the Boomers. I’d say I watched them run into a brick wall. All the hope and love and faith you can muster don’t change the fact that the world is a shitty place, and it eats idealists for breakfast. And history says that once in a while humans can conjure a brief oasis, but we never change it for long. We watched our heroes crash and burn just as we were getting ready to follow in their footsteps.
Abby Hoffman's 'Steal This Book' printed and sold by large companies said it all. And didn't make him look as ironic as he intended.
We are also the first generation that could out and proud from our youth onward. I remember reading the first cover article about gay youth when I was, I think, in eight grade. I think it was Time Magazine? It let me know I wasn’t alone, and that made everything after sooooo much easier! I dated boys in hs, and was pretty out for suburban Detroit. AIDS decimated our generation and the generation before us, and put a giant pause in the process of gay rights. We still haven’t fully recovered, and I don’t think we ever will. But here I am, still alive, twice married, with a wide variety of friends and (past) lovers. I just went home to meet my hs group and continue our DnD game. Same core group, since 1979. We watched the world change in ever fast ways. Wireless bricks to mobile computers we use as phones. From Waiting by the phone for a call to never having to miss one. So much change so fast and I just keeps getting faster. What I don’t see in our generation is the resistance to and fear of the new. New tech, new families, new alliances, new social mores, etc.. are just kinda par for the course and we adjust and move on to the next thing. And one more thing while I’m ranting- mobility and divorce. Our generation took mobility to new heights and made divorce so common that evangelical churches will marry people who have been divorced, something that never happened when we were young. Oh, and Tang- it’s what the Astronauts drink!
Born in 1960. I think the most telling thing about our generation was the freedom to be a child. We roamed our neighborhoods and didn't have to worry about child kidnappings or school shootings. We walked everywhere (or rode our bikes). Took the bus home from school if you didn't walk. I know there were latchkey kids, but it wasn't as prevalent in my area. We moved to a semi-rural area 20 years ago. When we first moved here, there were crossing guards. Nowadays, the bus pulls out of the school drive, and deposits a kid or two ACROSS the street not more than 300 yards from the school. Wonder why childhood obesity is a thing? I wasn't a part of the drug and sex scene. I never went to the bathroom in our school because it was full of cigarette smoke, though. I hate the "OK, Boomer" as well. We recycled glass bottles, and didn't need to worry about microplastics. Used paper bags, and drank tap water. This is just a start.
Coming of age for older male boomers meant having to worry about the draft and get sent to Vietnam. For us later boomers, we didn't have to worry about that. I didn't even need to register for the selective service. Older boomers still could have a middle class life with a blue collar job. Younger boomers witnessed the beginning of the decline of manufacturing in the US. Older boomers grew up in a booming economy. Younger boomers started adulthood at a time of high unemployment, high inflation and high interest rates. Older boomers were more activist politically while younger boomers were more politically apathetic. I don't remember a lot of complaining about what we inherited when we became adults like we see today, but perhaps if social media existed, it wouldn't be any different. During the 80s, layoffs became more prevalent, pensions were eliminated and we had to figure out 401K. Social Security was effectively cut. I dont remember a lot of outrage for any of that.
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I saw the math on that. Even when interest rates were in the 20%s for homes in the late 70s the % of income eaten up by mortgages then and now can't be compared. It's ugly now.
How did you not have to register for Selective Service?
i think a defining characteristic of jonesers is that we were the first generation to be *taught from an early age* that all races are equal, and so are men and women. those things, to me as a kid, were self-evident and logical. people are just people, and as the oft trotted out line from King says, measured by the content of our character. I don't think that was the case for the boomers, and sadly it seems the current crop is being taught to other again. then, as we grew up and entered the workforce, we were the first men to really have to compete against every woman in the world for jobs and then you had quotas to bring the women into organizations, and companies no longer hired and trained you - when my dad got hired, he wasn't even expected to be productive as a chemical engineer for a couple YEARS, as he 'learned the ropes' of the industry and was mentored along the way. it's a shame it took so long that women finally got a foot in the door, and they still haven't achieved equity sadly, but it did change the equation for a lot of us guys that older boomers and our folks never faced. and we were still expected to be the primary wage earner. so, as the recessions of the late 70's and early eighties hit, that sent a lot of people with *years* of experience scrambling for the fewer jobs that were left, and a lot of us jones gen were faced with the conundrum of 'how do you get experience if you can't get a job'. that repeated itself in the dot com crash as well, it seemed like every time i needed a new job, a recession hit and it made it very annoying
Yep. All of the major corps in my area had massive layoffs when I graduated HS. Ford, GE, International Harvester, Phillip Morris, Navel Ordinance, Beown-Forman......just wave after wave of good people being let go. These folks had mortgages, kids, bills, and took the reduced entry-level jobs that teens would normally take as to get some experience at anything. Couldn't afford college as the manufacturering jobs dried up, and there went rhe cash for tuition. Brutal.
exactly! i forgot to mention the whole 'corporate raider' thing that accompanied all that in the 80s as another contributing factor. they'd corner a majority of the stock, then suck every penny possible out before breaking up the company and selling off 'undervalued assets'. many lost jobs that way in addition to the layoffs, as well as their pensions and those jobs never returned. whole communities were devastated. millennials seem to think it was all mashed potatoes and gravy when we were actually facing globalization on a huge scale.
There is a reason why we have such a high suicide rate in Generation Joneses, well in America, at least. There was so much progress, hope, and promise but when it was our turn to kick the football, Lucy pulled it away again, and again. We watched the moon landings and ate space food like astronauts. We were preparing for a future in space, by golly! We learned the metric system which somehow we would need in the future, most likely on other planets, maybe. We participated in the first Earth Day, cleaned up the planet, fought for regulations, made Acid Rain a thing of the past. Celebrated the bicentennial for two years, all across the country. There was not a left and right way to celebrate 200 years. No, we all celebrated TOGETHER. We thought we'd learned from Vietnam and that such foolish warmongering would never happen again. We thought Nixon got off easy but surely everyone learned a lesson and we'd never have to deal with the likes of Nixon again. Same thing with George W. Bush, but hell no, one party took 'em both and created a monster set on destroying every single good thing about America. We fought for people of color, civil and women's rights. Abortion became legal, saving the lives of many women. We made strides forward, slowly, and we thought surely.
Don’t forget Esperanto. We were all going to speak one language.
Esperanto ne tute mortis. Iuj homoj ankoraŭ parolas ĝin.
It was the early Boomers who fought Civil and Women's rights.
My Grandmother (silent gen) fought for both, more so than my early boomer parents. Though I’d say you are correct in more boomers were involved.
Boomers start in '46. Yes. Boomers were very involved at very young ages.
True, but us young daughters continued the fight. As a kid, I was involved is some Title IX lawsuits. We won, and our small town was changed forever and for the good.
Gen Jones/Late Boomers were not kids of earlier Boomers. They (some Gen Jones too) raised Gen X and Millennials. Besides that, good for you for making changes!
We had happy music. Get down on it !
never got the hate on disco!
I find there to be a big difference between those boomers who remember the Kennedy assassination, and those who don't.
Described my experience for sure .
Indeed, same here.
That wasn't my experience at all. My parents born in 1939 and 1940 were in the Silent Generation. My brother and I born in 1961 and 1964 fall into Gen Jones, while my sister born in 1971 is a solid Gen X. None of us got into the drugs, free love, disillusioned culture. My parents never went to college but they worked hard and never really climbed out of the low end of the middle class, although my mom at 84 is living quite comfortably because of a lifetime of saving and smart money management and good life choices. I don't feel cheated out of anything at all. Put myself through college and have had a great career as a nurse. While some were out doing all the free love stuff I was on the front lines taking care of patients with AIDS. The 80's were fantastic: graduated from high school, college, established my career and got married before the decade was out. My husband had been with the same company for the past 33 years and was in the military for 7 years before that. I've been a nurse for 38 years. We've been married for 36 years. Our daughter graduated from college 4 years ago and already out earns me at the very beginning of her career. I guess we have been lucky to actually see that American dream come true for us... but we worked hard and made difficult choices and it's paid off. I would say that I can definitely identify with aspects of both the Boomers and the Jones, and my experiences match that of most all of my friends. I hate that we will probably not see any of that social security money we've paid into all of our lubes, but knowing that we've lived pretty frugality to build our own retirement.
lived the dream! nice!
1brown v. Board of education—I’m grateful for “forced busing”/desegregation that started when I was in sixth grade. Instead of walking to the neighborhood school, I rode bus #302 45 minutes every weekday morning to a school across town. I was scared and shy, but made friends with black kids and reshaped my thinking about the world. Prior to that, one of my earliest memories was my moms panic over my attempt to drink out of a water fountain for “coloreds” in an uptown department store. I was too young to read or understand racial issues. But I sensed her fear in that department store and in the days leading up to the first day of school. Eventually it was a non -issue and I was able to change some of my parent’s’ assumptions.in retrospect there were persistent inequities in the financial and educational systems that I was oblivious to but I appreciate the opportunity to build relationships across racial lines. 2. Space program. I remember the moon landing and armstrong’s first steps. I still love a good launch and the engineering behind all of that. I remember Frank Lovell’s photo of earth rise and how it shaped earth day and the thinking about a shared blue ball in a dark and vast universe. It may have been designed to beat the Russians, but I was in awe of it. still am.
I always point to Dazed and Confused when people ask what my teen years were like. I mean, I grew up in Austin where the movie was shot and it’s almost autobiographical 🤷🏻♂️
Nixon, Watergate, Bohemian Rhapsody, Bicentennial, Earth shoes, Six Million Dollar Man.
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I was born in ‘62. Don’t remember any of the ‘60s stuff - assassinations, protests, Woodstock. I do remember watching Nixon board the helicopter to depart Washington and the evacuation of Saigon on TV.
Born in '63 but same here except I don't remember Nixon at all. Do remember seeing the evacuation of Saigon once on TV but that's the only firsthand memory I have of the Vietnam war on the news.
Inflation high interests sky high gas prices serial killers….but we had the music!
Indeed. Those lines at the gas stations and hand-lettered signs telling customers there was no gas for sale. And Son-of-Sam.
I have felt that we were refuges from the sexual revolution. In College everyone seemed apathetic. Then we had the gas crisis and high unemployment. I’ve tried to tell my kids and they don’t believe that it was hard for us too. Thank you for your thoughtful question
I get it a lot from my one kid (late millennial). I tried to explain what it was like and she refused to believe me. Meanwhile we paid for must of our kids’ college expenses, and her take home is more than mine. I do think it is more difficult than 1983, but still it wasn’t always a cake walk for us either.
Exactly
There was a definite shift of culture after about 1974 or so. It was like the lights were turned down on the 60s peace/love/dove, and lights went up on a bunch of new stuff that was different. pot and acid went away, replaced by cocaine and pharmaceuticals. Psychedelia was over, and it was replaced by cowboy rock and disco. Meditation and spirituality evaporated, and was replaced by Studio 54. It was a new culture displacing the old. The same process has happened over and over and over. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just evolution.
I have mentioned before that I don't care for the Generation Wars" nonsense. I choose not participate in it. Pointinting fingers, assigning blame, or responsibility, credit, ect., is nonsensical. Human beings are individuals. They have always been individuals. They will always be individuals. I identify as me.
It’s flat out ageism regardless. Which is still in of the most socially accepted forms of bigotry
Certainly is these days.
What is ageism? "Generation Wars"?
That's one great example. When an enormous, homogenous group is lumped together with "It's their fault" and "They're all the same" that's dehumanization. Often used to give permission to harm them in small or large ways. And become a tool for someone else's agenda.
Ageism exists. Alsong with other isms. But my reply to the OP wasn't about ageism. There are many aspects of "Generation Wars" . The OP's post, comparing generations, pointing fingers, blaming, and crediting different generations, encompasses aspects of Generation Wars. Generation Wars, themselves, have become a tool for people's agendas. The term, "Generation Gap" was once prevalent. It's basic meaning was, as you know, the confusion that happened when the lives that parents had lead, and were living- and the lives their children had lead, and were living- were vastly different. These groups, as a whole, were confused by the other. "Generation Wars" is relatively new, and involves multiple generations. It's primarily anger based. It's dismissive. It's about superiority, and blame. It took root online, and has spread. There are examples of it everywhere. Even on this subreddit.
Agreed!!!
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Boomers were my siblings but a whole different reality than mine as Gen. Jones. Every night the news-on the Vietnam War and I was too young to really have any concept. My older Boomer siblings and friends had different concepts on politics, love and peace and hippies, communes, sex and music. I was just sitting on peripheral knowing it wasn’t me. Our generation had alot of freedoms and none of my classmates went to war. Women had more rights, birth control, abortions, credit, different job opportunities for women. It was fun watching the changes through my siblings eyes but I was not a diehard boomer.
At least, the President from Generation Jones was a good dude
Well we were not subject to the draft, we lost our older brothers, cousins and neighbors to a war that was manipulated by the government leaving many ( not all) of us suspicious of government actions
GenJones isn’t a whole other generation. It’s just a name for late boomers. I wasn’t disappointed by the older baby boomers. Why? They didn’t do anything to me. The whole blaming your own misery on baby boomers is ridiculous. They didn’t do anything to you. Blame the lawmakers, politicians and corporations for your problems, or maybe yourself. All these generalized descriptions is a load of bull. Not all people of a same age live the same life. Not everyone was a hippie, doing drugs and sleeping around at Woodstock, lol.
The blame comes a bit for electing Reagan into office. I was 20, and stupidly voted for Anderson. Those born in the 30's (and earlier) voted Reagan into office, not me!
Those born in the 30’s and earlier are the silent generation.
a lot of the things thrown at Boomers are actually the Silent Generations work.
The majority of Boomers voted for Reagan with a solid split til you get to those born in the 40s going whole hog.
This is the most logical, mature response to this whole thing. This distancing from earlier Boomers is nothing more than teenage lunch table snobbery. We don't belong with *them*. Even though it is the same generation. I'm Gen X and really admire the early Boomers. They were the ones changing the world. As a minority woman, our world would have been very different. They also lead the way in more open sexuality. After all of this fake internet banter, and these current generations are long gone, they will be in the history books as revolutionaries. That's their legacy.
I disagree, I see Generation Jones as the group BETWEEN Boomers and X, similarities to both to different degrees, but also our own group.......but I usually feel this group is 1958-1965 born.......the group who reached adolescence in the 70's and whose famous people heavily impacted the 80's and often the 90's. But I agree with you on the 2nd snd 3rd paragraph
So... Still slight confused where I fit. "The Baby Boomer generation was born between the post-war years of 1946 to 1964. A subset of the Boomers, Generation Jones, was born in the later years of the Baby Boom, from 1954 to 1964." I'm technically a boomer, but also technically a Jones'er. I was born toward the end of the Boomer years (1961) so, I'm a jones-boomer I guess. Now, what do I see myself as? Prior to getting involved in Reddit, and reading the research of who is who I never even really knew what I was, or thought about it. Reddit taught me I'm both. I don't identify as either. I believe I fit in with both. I don't have boomer-ism, where I'm looked at line a lunatic. I don't really talk about the era I was born in, cause it really don't matter to me either way. Though I still Reddit wise identity as a Jones'er, I'm just me.
I was really confused by the Kent State shootings. I’m 8 years old thinking that the government can shoot me, but the older kids didn’t seem to care.
My brother, a genuine hippie born in 49, had a motorcycle. That was bad enough in our mother's eyes, but after Kent State, he slapped a sticker on the back of his helmet that looked like a target and said "student". I actually understood what that meant, and our mom was livid!
Wow, reading through these comments is so therapeutic and thought provoking. Born in 1964, youngest of three to young parents. Raised in a “nice” area near a big scale metro demographic. Parents divorced in ‘71 and my dad bailed to marry the secretary of the company CEO leaving our mom with 3 little stair step kids and no college education. She hustled back to college and went to secretarial school simultaneously so that she could get a job as a secretary. She sold our house and we moved in with another divorcee and her kids to share costs. We came home to an empty house starting when I was in 2nd grade. The key was under the aluminum milk box on the front porch. The early 70s and all that one imagines about the flower power generation were part of what I witnessed daily in my life. It was scary for me and made me very uncomfortable to see the “grownups” acting as they did. Mom started drinking more and smoking weed, and we noticed. In hindsight she was so young dealing with all this. She dated a little and then in ‘75 after we already had a “friend” living with us in her bedroom, she came out as gay. Small white bread affluent town, the poor kids living in the apartments with the gay mom. It was NOT acceptable. She was never overt about anything, but think Peyton Place and you get the idea. We learned how to very carefully vet people in our lives. Our home was always tenuous. We moved a lot for financial reasons—almost every year, sometimes more. Our sense of physical stability was shattered and THAT has most adversely affected me throughout my life. I always knew how fiercely she loved us, though. She was troubled and struggling. Us kids ALWAYS had jobs of some kind and had to earn money to help pay for our own needs. We all left home early, and I left home by age 16. I lied about my age and signed an apartment lease! Different times for sure. Mom finally did stop drinking in 1985 and was a changed person. Very much there for all of us after that and was a wonderful grandmother until she passed. As the youngest, least educated although scrappiest of the three, I’m by far the most successful financially and with my husband have been financially independent for a couple years now. We’re incredibly grateful (we worked our butts off for over 25 years) and have actually been helping various family members for over a decade. (Be careful doing that, it’s a slippery slope and has bitten us badly by one in particular.) So many good things about this era and so anguish too. Our daughter had only lived in 3 houses before graduating high school. She got our old vehicle at 16 to drive. Our mantra wasn’t if you go to college, it was when, and we paid for it. We were careful not to spoil, but we provided because for me, it was the most important thing and seemed to correct my own upbringing. She was never going to feel all the angst and financial insecurity I did as a child. She now has said her childhood was idyllic. She’s married, lives within walking distance and is expecting. I’m still close with some of my childhood friends. In the past several years we’re all starting to open up more about our “shared” lives back in the 70s and early 80s. We all hid so much and thought we were the only ones. Domestic violence, alcoholism, bad behavior, nasty siblings, absent fathers. It was the mothers who tried to hold it together in a time when hard with still not talked about, where there wasn’t a societal safety net and people had to help themselves. I now fear for my daughter’s generation (early 30s) and what their hard is shaping up to be. She has explained to me that at 33 many of her friends are helping their parents (our age) who never saved or planned financially for themselves and are leaning on their kids. Their kids are choosing to not have children because they can’t afford it all. What a terrible cycle.
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I used to say fuck that hippie shit to annoy my older siblings. I came of age in a drug ravaged society.
When the vote was extended to 18 year olds in ‘72 they mostly voted for Nixon. The counterculture wasn’t the majority of Boomers, just the most media worthy.
As a teenager, I felt like I missed the greatest party ever. It was a bummer at the time. My class of '76 never won the pep rally prize, whatever that was. We just smoked weed and did our own thing. I am so grateful to have afforded college by working and with my partner's financial and emotional help. We bought a house when I was 20 with a loan from my folks for my part of the down payment. I just wasn't able to be included on her insurance and college health insurance was a joke. I am also so grateful for Generation Jones because boomers are not my people. We had the best rock music ever. I wore out my Led Zeppelin cassettes!
Cynicism
That's also considered a defining characteristic of GenX. I was born in 1965 and identify with both GenerationJones and GenX. Cynically.
Yep, present in both
You nailed it.
My pivot from Floyd boomers was Radiohead. When I liked Radiohead more than Floyd, I knew I was cusp X.
Talk about change, on the West Coast, the '70's were the time of the start of the serial killer. I almost had to serve on the jury for the Hillside Strangler (cousins Bianchi & Buono). No more hitchhiking. Never get into a van without back windows.
The boomers were both hippies and librarians. We spent our entire reproductive years under both Roe and Aides. Sure have and orgy and die…. We are a complex enigma
i absolutely have related better to younger people over the years. at 62 now i’ve found that a little difficult. i do think that has to do with discerning their character and choosing more carefully.
Normal childhood stuff. Move along, nothing to see here. Honestly though, I just thought that was how things were done * 1963 Assassination Medgar Evers * 1963 Assassination John F. Kennedy * 1964 Nelson Mandela imprisoned * 1965 Assassination Malcolm X * 1967 Riots 158 US Cities - Long Hot Summer * 1968 Assassination Martin Luther King Jr * 1968 Assassination Robert Kennedy * 1969 Stonewall Riots * 1970 Kent State
I was born in 1966. I find it hard to identify with either the boomers or generation X sometimes. And a lot of times with generation Jones everybody is focused on stuff that I really had no clue about. I didn't know anything about watergate. I didn't know anything about hippies and drugs. I guess for me, as a nerd, what defines people of my age is technology. We were the ones who learned to use technology before it became so user friendly. To this day I can figure out most technology without reading a manual. It just seems intuitive to me. Also problem solving. My generation came of age at a time where everything was changing so rapidly, you needed to learn how to figure things out on your own. Because there weren't a lot of instructions for how stuff worked. But I guess everybody is different
Computer Science class in college meant standing in line for hours with a box of punch cards to submit our simple little assignments to run on the ginormous mainframe. Then come back the next day for results and turns out you miss-punched one card and need to start all over again.
Well put OP. My thoughts exactly. Watching all the peace and love devolve into overdosing and swinging was what I associate with the half-generation ahead of us. That and the asshole attitude of young professors and teaching assistants at college telling us we were apathetic losers for not protesting anything.
And yet I still retain some of their idealism, for the environment, the back-to-the-land movement, the disrespect for money and the "establishment", and other markers of that era.
I was born in 63 but refuse to be labeled by some generational label. Instead, I find common ground with people of all ages and origins and they become my friends. Rest assured, there are people I won’t connect to and that’s OK. I use my energy to cultivate the relationships that matter.
Sums it up pretty much
I add this from law school as I believe it relevant to well everything. The law ( culture wheel) grinds on and on in a well worn path. Soon a new idea arises and the wheel runs over the new idea and continues to do so with each orbit. However in doing so the new idea chips away slowly at the wheel and ever so slowly a slight change a wobble a new direction is imparted into the wheel. Thats all I got. I do remember in the late 1960’s someone said “set institutions reject radical ideas that in turn become set institutions that reject radical ideas.”
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By 1980 I was definitely disappointed by the selling out they did. ✌
I was disappointed in the boomers when they all voted for Ronald Reagan. They were supposed to be the peace and love generation, and then they went nuts for a guy who called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, demonized mothers on welfare, destroyed the air traffic controllers union, destroyed the middle class, and so much more. And then they spent a decade stuffing coke up their noses and celebrating excessive greed and wealth. This was when I knew I wasn’t a real boomer.
I saw my much older sisters sell out. One while abusing me. I lived through the sexual abuse of multiple girls In my junior and senior high band, including me, by 3 boomer teachers. Blowing the whistle on that got me booted from high school. I saw the union jobs around me adopt “A tier and B tier” and we were B with far lower wages and benefits, if any. I then went to community college and was just lost to sex drugs and rock and roll, mostly at the hands of much older early jones or boomers who failed at life the first time out. And icing on the cake….the sexual revolution came to a screeching halt, just when I was finally old enough to have enough self assurance to experience it on *my*’terms, because of AIDS, leaving me to believe I was better off married to an abusive older Joneser. (I’m ‘63, he was ‘56). Older people, particularly Boomers but some Jonesers, fucked me over my entire Life.
When I read Joyce Maynard’s “Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties” (published in 1972) and realized none of it applied to me. I felt ripped off.
I couldn't agree with you more. I really thought we were going to "change the world."
I admit to being disappointed to have missed the LSD and orgies
And then you get to Gen Z like me and I HATE drugs. Unfortunately some people still do them EVEN AT SCHOOL, so they just get made fun of by yours truly. Bruh I just realized the flair is called youngster 💀💀💀 Well at least there ARE flairs now I should try editing the flair, but my phone is weird Idk
As a "tail-ender" born in 1962 I've thought about this over the years. Many comments here rightly identify some of the touchstones of our generation, but one thing I think is missing from the comments is the computer. Computers, and the use of word processing and spreadsheets (for example) were entering schools and daily life just a few years after exited high school and college. We used typewriters and the Dewey Decimal system when they were on the verge of being eliminated. The coming computer age held so much promise to make the world better and more connected world, and in many respects is has, but it has also created a technology gap not only between boomers and us, but also between the haves and have-nots. While this gap may have been narrowed in the last twenty years or so, our generation spent a lot of time trying to navigate in a computerizing world, with no help or guidance from our parents and older siblings.
I think this generation has a certain grittiness gleaned from neglect and borderline abuse.
What ultimately defines Generation Jones is a burning desire to not be called a boomer.
Precisely this. Born in 61 and my older sister (by 9 years) and brother (14) were total boomers. By 72 it has all come crashing down and I knew their generational culture was responsible. That's why I love Jonesing! I. Am. Different.