Wealth, cynicism, activism: these are all somewhat shaped by the generation we are born into. Which means Gen X-ers should now be at the peak of their influence. So what’s holding them back?
From the Greatest Generation (born 1900) to Generation Alpha (born 2010), everyone currently drawing breath fits into a neat category based around the year in which they were born. Apparently. That Winston Peters and Martin Luther King Jr are both members of what is called the Silent Generation suggests these labels have limited usefulness. The closer one looks at the generations, the more imprecise the categories become – just star signs with better stats to back them up.
What then of Generation X, the allegedly forgotten generation born between 1965 and 1980, in numbers smaller than the Baby Boomers who preceded them and the Millennials who followed? According to figures quoted on RNZ, 1,065,000 Baby Boomers were born in New Zealand, 935,000 Gen-X babies and 1,060,000 Millennials.
What defines Gen X, apart from that 15-year band? A typical explanation is that they “came of age during a time of economic uncertainty, technological transformation and profound social changes”, according to marketing website mediaculture.com. Sure – but what generation didn’t?
US psychologist Jean Twenge has written widely and authoritatively on the nature of the cohorts. She has a litany of traits for X-ers that includes an apparent jumble of not necessarily complementary characteristics: love for shared pop-culture escapism, adaptability, shorter childhood and longer adolescence, high self-esteem, cynicism, political apathy, interest in saving the environment, delayed leadership.
But even when there are clear generational differences, they tend to be minor. One of the most comprehensive surveys of attitudes between generations is undertaken by market research firm Ipsos, examining everything from anticipated spend on subscriptions to overall happiness. On economic categories, confidence among New Zealanders is highest with Boomers then decreases with each generation down to Generation Z. And in most cases – feeling loved, feeling life has meaning, feeling in touch with nature – the difference between the generations’ poles are within a range of 10%. For instance, 87% of Boomers are satisfied that they can say and do what they want, as are 78% of Gen X and Gen Z.
More extreme variations could warrant further examination. Satisfaction with co-workers is a high 92% for Boomers, 79% for Gen X and a dispiriting 67% for Gen Z. Only 4% of Boomers are dissatisfied with co-workers, while 19% of Gen X and 29% of Gen Z feel that way.
The tendency of prophecies to self-fulfil doesn’t help: unless you’re in marketing, that is. If you tell people often enough that they are obsessed with popular culture, those Star Wars T-shirts and REM boxed sets will sell themselves.
Clearly, some generalisations can be made with confidence. It’s only logical that people living through the same social forces at the same developmental stages will show some of the same consequences. The global financial crisis of 2007-08 had lasting economic effects on many age groups, but these were the years when Gen X should have been consolidating retirement savings and home ownership but found their ability to do either severely curtailed.
As can be seen from the graphic (opposite), the generational names, when first given, had no basis in research. They were merely nicknames that stuck – Gen X might as easily have been called Gen Slacker, and Millennials Avocado Botherers. Is there anything that can be meaningfully said of Generation X when that group, no longer children, now have children and even grandchildren of their own? Is X actually three generations in the biblical sense?
“Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials have at least one thing in common,” says Forbes magazine: “They all claim to be doing it tougher than the rest”. Yet, a UK poll by YouGov earlier this year found 27% of people don’t identify as the generation they fall under and 15% aren’t even sure what generation they are.
But Canadian management expert Sean Lyons, writing for The Conversation, says the generation narratives are “compelling in their simplicity. They reduce the bewildering complexity of social change into an easy-to-apply typology.”
Wealth divide
Kiwi academic, author and Gen Xer Max Rashbrooke has a typically individual view of the usefulness of labels.
“My reservation about them is that I think divisions between classes, whatever age they are, are often greater than generational divides,” says Rashbrooke. “When you look at the data, yes, Boomers are a lot wealthier than Millennials, for instance, but that’s because, generally, people get wealthier as they age.
“There is actually more wealth around than there was. So, ultimately, Gen X is probably going to be wealthier, in the fullness of time, than the Baby Boomers were.”
Which will be great for some Gen Xers but not all.
“One of the big stories about Gen X is that there will be very, very large inequalities,” he says. “There are very wealthy Gen Xers and there are very, very poor Gen Xers. And in many cases, that wealth and that poverty will be tied to who their parents were.
“There’s a lot of transmission of advantage and disadvantage through the generations, and I think that’s often more powerful than the disparities between the generations themselves.”
Time to shine
Someone who should be conscious of generational differences is the Retirement Commissioner, but Boomer Jane Wrightson is equally sceptical of the value of labels. “They are demographic. They’re barely psychographic,” says Wrightson. “I tend to think you’re more of a product of your upbringing and your education than you are necessarily of your generation.”
Yes, but aren’t Gen Xers coming into their own with their moments in the sun? Jacinda Ardern, Taika Waititi, Peter Beck, Rod Drury, Mike Hosking – all Gen X. The current Prime Minister is Gen X. As are Elon Musk, Julian Assange and the President of France. Our current Parliament is a Gen X refuge, with an average age of 49 for MPs. Prominent German-born, sort-of Kiwis Peter Thiel and Kim Dotcom are Gen X.
Kamala Harris, born October 1964, is two tantalising months off being officially Gen X but has been granted an exemption by opinion writers eager to co-opt her to make their case for the resurgence. So, yes, they are riding high in terms of prominence, but as we have seen, this is as much the result of arithmetic as anything else. Their financials aren’t actually that great and Boomers aren’t giving way gracefully.
Recruitment specialist Ian Scott, of Randstad NZ, described in the New Zealand Herald a Boomer trend towards “unretirement”, citing research that 20% of Boomers intended to keep working past retirement age because they could not afford to stop. And then they die. Finally.
Safe pair of hands
One significant difference between Gen Xers here and around the world is their enthusiasm for activism. Overseas, Gen Xers have been hailed as voices for change: Harris, Assange, the late Tupac Shakur. (Although, scratch this perception and you will find, for instance, that Kalle Lasn, co-initiator of the highly Gen X-ish Occupy Wall St movement, was a member of the Silent Generation, born in 1942.)
Here, progressive voices, facing right or left, are more likely to be Millennials or Gen Z, such as David Seymour, Chlöe Swarbrick, Jordan Williams and an emerging generation of young Māori leaders. Our Xers have tended to the “safe pair of hands” philosophy espoused by Ardern and her finance minister Grant Robertson.
Rashbrooke agrees Gen X were disenchanted and politically active but Millennials’ “level of disillusionment of government and collective action is even greater than ours was. My sense is that they believe in the potential for change more, maybe, than Gen X did. But they have got so disheartened around government that they see their activism through more of an individual prism.”
Gen X was the first cohort to grow up in the completely neoliberal economic environment imposed by the 1984 Labour government. Leaders such as Ardern, Robertson and Chris Hipkins came to political maturity “during a time when progressives were really on the back foot”, says Rashbrooke.
“I wonder if that political formation was quite telling in the end, because it felt like the last Labour government, for all that it enjoyed an immense amount of power, certainly in the second term, still had quite a defensive mindset.” Perhaps succeeding generations “will be a bit bolder because they haven’t lived through that period”.
Benefits of timing
As they moved into adulthood, Gen X got to take lots of good stuff for granted, such as accessible contraception and more representative government. They also benefited from advances driven by Boomers’ needs and the sheer size of that horde – not just medical breakthroughs but awareness of mental health issues, a resurgence of Māori culture, increased support for local arts, notably music and film, and more enlightened attitudes to aged care.
“The longevity issue is really important,” says Wrightson, “and it is a worry because each generation is lasting longer. This particularly affects women. And women tend to have [fewer assets] accumulated and suffer more with life shocks, like divorce, so they’ve got a longer period to fund in their retirement, which is why you’ll see them continue to work, because they have to.
“All the projections say hitting 100 is going to be a bit unremarkable in a generation and a half, which I just find horrific as a concept.”
All this for Gen X to deal with after surviving high tertiary fees and student loans, the GFC, the really bad news about climate change, shaky home ownership and an enormous cohort of older people who need their superannuation funded.
Unfortunately, Xers’ smaller numbers mean there are fewer people to pay for the Boomers’ needs. Fortunately, there will be more Millennials to help out the Xers in their turn.
Another easily overlooked unearned benefit Xers have enjoyed is that, as Rashbrooke notes, “we were very much the hinge generation for the internet. I grew up without the internet. It only really started impinging on my consciousness when I was at university. So I’m comfortable with the technological developments of the past few decades, but I also remember a time before then, which I think is quite a useful perspective to have.”
There’s no doubt Xers would wipe the floor with Millennials in a library-using competition. But maybe not in the race for financial security.
“What we do know from our own figures,” says Wrightson, “is that 61% of Gen X are rating themselves as financially uncomfortable. That’s quite a high percentage. We don’t know why. It might be because they’re at the stage now where they are becoming more thoughtful about what the next 10 or 20 or 30 years means. They should be thinking: ‘Oh yeah, I’m nearly there. That’s okay.’ But they might have one of those stonking great mortgages, and they can’t see how they can pay it off.”
Existential issues
As the youngest Xers hit their mid-40s, they are not facing the future with the confidence of their predecessors. “If you’re a Gen Xer who’s only just got a mortgage, then you’re the same as a Millennial, and you’ll be more panicky, because you’ve got less time to pay it off,” says Wrightson.
Rashbrooke quotes figures that show Gen X may be worrying unnecessarily. “The latest data we have on wealth is from the 2021 household economics survey and that does show that if we take Gen X as people aged 45-54, which would be a big clump of them, their average net wealth was $545,000. And then for people 55-64, which I guess is also partly Gen X, their average net worth was $701,000.
“That’s not far below the Baby Boomers. Mind you, because they’re essentially retired, they’re in what you call dis-saving, technically, ie, spending down their wealth.
“So, Gen X is doing okay in wealth terms, but then you’d sort of expect that, because you get wealthier as you get older.”
But it’s not all about showing them the money. For the big existential issues, we are all in it together, and the generation gap is a very narrow one. “Gen X do have the opportunity to fix a lot of problems,” notes Rashbrooke. “We’re coming into our moment in the sun politically at a point when the world is in a fair old state of turmoil. But we’re also coming into a world where there’s incredible tools to deal with a lot of these problems around things like renewable energy and the opportunities that the internet does offer.
“I get frustrated when people say, ‘The kids are all right, they will solve all these problems around climate change’, which is mostly what you hear Boomers saying. I think that’s a lot of responsibility to put on people who are still in their 20s. I think that responsibility does fall on Gen X now, but that responsibility is also an opportunity.”
Don’t worry, you’ll fit right in
Trust the algorithm overlords at Spotify to take the demographic generations concept and twist it into conclusions that are so diffuse as to be meaningless.
In the words of campaignbrief.com, the streaming service’s “market first … What’s Your Music Generation? in-app experience is an interactive personalised on-platform experience”. How the knowledge that one’s tastes are, for example, 37% Boomer, 32% Millennial, 24% Gen X and 7% Gen Z enriches our lives in any useful sense is not explained.
Other marketers don’t even bother with the interactive cyberwashing but go straight for the wallet – er sorry, online shopping experience. Target your product according to “Gen X’s Top 4 Priorities for Wellness”, according to leger360.com.
Apparently, Gen X believes: Supplements Make a Difference in Health (77%), Staying Active Is Important (71%), Products with Health Benefits Are Worth the Money (67%) and Mental Health Is a Priority (66%). How do they know?
Another piece of egregiousness from recent weeks was the mass email from HR management company UKG reporting that 68% of Gen Z have experienced a miscommunication at work as a result of using email or another digital communication tool; 71% of Gen Z find it difficult to speak up or contribute in video conference meetings and 29% of Gen Z prefer face-to-face communication at work, with instant messaging following closely at 25%. In other words, if you can’t get your point across by email or text you can still go and talk to the person.
Even the UK’s Guardian newspaper is happy to play along. A recent headline read “Mortgage or orgasm? Why Gen Z would happily give up sex – if it meant they could buy a house”.
The current proliferation of tags apparently being insufficient, there have been efforts to identify new subsets, such as Generation Jones, which sounds like a mass-market denim label, but is a slice taken off the end of the baby boom to accommodate the fact that those born in 1964 have little in common with those born straight after World War II.
The alphabet having been exhausted at one end, people born in 2011 and later are being labelled Gen Alpha. They may well look forward to the intriguing fate predicted by Peter Kenway, of the New Policy Initiative, who warns that “asset distribution between Millennials will become so unequal that we may enter a Jane Austen-style marriage market, as Millennials without an inheritance try to partner up with Millennials who stand to inherit a house”.