02-06-2017, 01:26 AM
(02-05-2017, 12:26 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:(02-05-2017, 07:17 AM)Mikebert Wrote:SomeGuy Wrote:So, what were your late teen college years like? Personally speaking?
Mostly school, work, and hanging out with my friends who had moved out at 18 (I didn't leave until the advanced age of 21). We would drink beer, smoke bowls and listen to tunes. I knew a couple of guys with thousand album collections and they would make mix-tapes for me. Nowadays everyone can get just about any tune on the internet. But back then it took some doing to get huge collections.
A number of my buds were youngest sons with GI parents and older siblings/cousins. Sometimes we talked about how we had missed it all, unlike those 10 years older who were able to go Woodstock and do all the Sixties stuff. Of course, we missed Vietnam, so maybe it was just as well
We saw ourselves as a different generation than they.
I was also into programming. My dad was really interested in computers, so he built a terminal using a 300 baud modem with acoustic coupler to dial into the public school system time-sharing system (Dad was a shop teacher). We learned BASIC together. Then he got into assembler and my brother and I tried to write a text dungeon game with 16 K to work with. I might have gone into computers, but when I took Fortran in summer 1978 I found they were still using Hollerith cards, which turned me off.
I had had a lab in the basement when I was in junior high, and so had an interest in chemistry, which led to me majoring in chem. I ended up with a Ph.D. in Chem E. after research I did for a writing assignment my senior college year showed me this was a better way to go career-wise. I also played D&D. I was a total nerd--still am.
Sounds reasonably Joneser-ish. How did your brother turn out?
Look, it's clearly an analogue-process between generations, with wide variance within each one. That doesn't mean there isn't anything there. I was born in 1986, the youngest child of parents born in 1951. My brothers were born in 1976 and 1979 (I was an accident). I have five cousins, who were born between 1979 and 1984 or so. I also have a second cousin (my grandma's younger brother had a child late in life) and two... half uncles? (my grandfather's kids from his second marriage) who were all born in the mid-70s. So, everybody in my "generation" roughly straddled the Xer/Millie divide. There are naturally similarities between me and my oldest brother, despite being 10 years apart on either side of the dividing line, because we are related and share the same parents. But there are also differences between me and him, or my cousin and his oldest sisteshis oldest sisters, etc. that are very similar across the families and reflect the predicted gnerational differences. The ones born in the 70s were way more fucked up when they were in their 20s, had much worse relations with their parents, and now in their late 30s to mid 40s have all become extremely conservative, risk-adverse, and overly protective and controlling of their children where they have had them. It was one of those things that made me go, "AHA! That's why that happened!" when i first read S & H.
There's definitely some fuzz around the edges. I think I'm about Mikebert's age, but my friends and I definitely felt like we were the same generation as people who went to Woodstock while in college. In fact, my father would have taken me if I'd been willing, but I was a square and wasn't interested.
My brother is a 1961 birth, and he has generally been a classic Gen X type in terms of his approach to life. However, he self describes differently now; he has started sounding more like a boomer and less like an Xer, though that may be because he knows he can be blunt with me. But Strauss & Howe did also say that the generational boundaries can shift over time.
It's also possible to have a personality type that doesn't fit the generational gestalt. I have an X acquaintance who constantly chafes because he has more of a boomer personality, but is never taken seriously in that role due to his age.
That said, the plural of anecdote is not data. I think the ends of crisis wars create a clear distinction between civics and adaptives, and between adaptives and idealists. I'm open to the idea that the boundaries between idealists and reactives, and between reactives and civics, are less clear cut.