Monday, November 9, 2015

Nothing

The Boomers tore down the societal structures of their times and left Gen X with Nothing in its place.

Having Nothing to lose, we created an interconnected, streaming digital age from thin air.

The Internet Age gave rise to the internet of Things, and we weren't interested in Things in the first place. Millennials continue to integrate their Things through their phones, which aren't really phones any more so much as they are command centers. Faced with paper and a pen, this generation born into an on-demand, share-everything world freaks out a bit. They continue to blend their technology to ever-increasing levels of seamlessness, a world without edges or boundaries, defined more by the platform used than any other single demographic.

Gen X is in the business of rejecting this new identity structure, because we don't think our identities should be structured. We want work-life balance to have more quality in work and life, and more autonomy in both. We don't want our movies to share our watching habits automatically to the Cloud, the Stream, the Wall. We like our streams to be silent and private affairs, places where we can be still enough to hear the movement.

While the Millennials are making money and vaulting up the ladder of success, Gen X is still looking at the ladder and wondering where it all goes, walking away. We are still as savvy, self-reliant and skeptical as we were when AIDS hit the airwaves the week after we watched "The Day After" and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Nothing is too good for us (it was created by the Boomers, after all), but we want it back anyway.