(02-24-2019, 06:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Well done article.
A nomad generation was supposed to accept in mid-life the increasing progressive, more collective or community-oriented slant of society during a 4T, and use their productive and innovative skill to be effective managers of the response to the crisis, while visionary prophets provide direction and guidance, and civics the man/woman power and dedication. That depends on some blue boomers fulfilling their roles as gray champion leaders. The younger generations will power this societal shift toward collegiality and community, but some leadership will still be Boomer, and Xers are still best fitted to be effective crisis managers. But even if Gen X doesn't produce a president (except another cusper like Obama), Xers will increasingly predominate in power, while millennials predominate in voting numbers and rising stars. As you imply, in the next 10 years it will be those Xers who can adapt to the less neo-liberal individualist regime who will gain power, especially in blue states and probably the nation.
A Nomad/Reactive generation accepts the more equitable, progressive, and communitarian ethos that emerges at some point in the 4T because the every-man-for-himself concept fails all but the most ferocious predators within Humanity. A Nomad generation that can do little to protect itself can at the least create the material and institutional bases of a safer and more satisfying world for its younger loved ones. The Nomad/Reactive generation is unable to create the ethos, but it can pick and choose as Prophet/Idealist factions, especially the exploiters who see themselves as benefactors to those that they cheat out of any chance at happiness, discredit themselves. The Prophet/Idealist has seen it all if he has so chosen, but the Nomad/Reactive has felt it all. Note also that in desperate attempts to get personal recoveries from economic calamities typical of a 4T, Nomads are the ones to do small-scale enterprise on a shoe-string that can be models for doing much the same on a bigger scale when the capital is available. One fails alone as a Nomad/Reactive, and one finds others imitating what one does on a bigger scale for more profit if one succeeds as a Nomad/Reactive.
Quote:I would think though that Boomers who looked upon a career as a calling, and as a fulfilling vocation rather than just a job, were not workaholics in the sense of being impelled to work too much. The stronger survival instinct of the Xer would seem to imply workaholism because of the need to survive. Boomer parents were often lauded by the older cohort millennials as caring and good teachers. Silents were the neglectful ones.
Whoever loves his job has solved most of the problems in his life, whether he is an intellectual or a laborer. The problem with Boomers was that too many wanted to be cerebral leaders at the neglect of the material basis of prosperity. Maybe our Silent guidance counselors told too many of us "whatever you do, don't do factory work", and too many of us heeded that advice. We ended up competing for jobs that weren't available, and we neglected the gritty world of making the material basis of prosperity. We still need glass, steel, petroleum, and concrete for prosperity, and we left manufacturing exclusively to the dummies. Many of us ended up seeking jobs that did not exist while needful work went undone or was done badly. Just look at the 1970s as a sort of hard time for the automotive industry, when American-made cars were awful and imports started taking over the market.
Quote:Those who understand the direction of society and technology will help shift society away from work to survive. Didn't I just post a Ted talk about this? Ah, here it is. Maybe a European Gen Xer is well-enough immune to the survivalist mentality so prevalent among Americans (especially Gen X, but certainly not exclusively to them). Or maybe he's a millennial.
There will always be opportunity for work. Manufacturing became a bigger share of the economy as food surpluses emerged and fewer people were needed for farm labor. Intellectual property is now a bigger share of the economy now that few of us are in gross need of material comforts.
Quote:"I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread, and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job, but for a life well lived. I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege, but a right we all deserve."
The economic paradigm that we now know will fail because the command-and-control system behind it will become unworkable. Need and fear will no longer drive people to do what is simply necessary for the indulgence of economic elites. Indeed, the depravity of the most prominent member of America's economic elite, Donald Trump, exemplifies the last-ditch efforts of that elite to grab what it can while it can. Even if the rapacious crony capitalist does not face the 21st-century equivalent of the Madame Guillotine, that beast can also become irrelevant and know it. The command-and-control system mandates drudgery for the masses...but what if the drudgery becomes unnecessary?
Most of us still have a desire to create and experience. Curiosity will be among the strongest tools of the marketer. Enterprise will still thrive -- but it will not have inequality of result as an objective.
Quote:Gen Xers enjoy preeminence in entertainment? Boy, their "entertainment" sure leaves me cold. TV shows today have no character. Give me the older GI and Silent-produced ones any day. Gen X music (and late Boomer music too for that matter) is loud and deliberately obnoxious, at least the American music. Gen Xers here have justified this as a protest against their life situation. I say they did not use their angst to develop it into a real art form. Some Gen X culture is better than others, but overall I'd say it's as weak a contribution as their Republican politicians have made. The myth makers that created the franchises were mostly boomers.
One of the basic rules of television programming is that anyone over 48 who is not fantastically wealthy (and can thus buy the high-priced products of brokerage and life insurance, elite real estate, and very expensive vehicles and 'luxury' travel --- including perhaps visits to Pebble Beach and Augusta*) is irrelevant. Entertainment that satisfies older audiences but not younger audiences goes off the air because advertisers can't reach them. Most people over 48 have already solidified their consumer habits if they are not so erratic in their consumer habits that their choices are caprice beyond the suggestions of advertising. So contrast two families, the middle-class Schmidt family of two 50-something professionals who live in Arlington, Texas and the struggling blue-collar Herrera family that consists of two adults with cr@ppy jobs and three kids in Brownsville, Texas. So the Herrera family doesn't have much disposable income? Sure -- but it is still not fully set on what brand names of breakfast cereal and clothes-washing detergents to buy. If you are the advertising agency for P&G or Kellogg's, you are going to pay attention to the Herrera family and try to reach it. The Herrera family still has some flexibility in consumer choices.
Quote:But kudos to the Xer journalist-comedians. Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Seth Meyers and others help to make the times we live in under the cheeto in chief barely tolerable. Gen X irony has its value.
Such are the times in which we live. If you can't laugh, you will cry.
*Golf gets very poor ratings as raw numbers, but it has an upscale audience capable of buying such things as million-dollar life-insurance policies, and trips to the expensive shrines of golf.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.