Sarada does not like Legs & Co. I don’t know what she thinks of Kool & The Gang or ‘Jones vs Jones’ but I do know that Top Of The Pops was a huge influence on her generation in this country, as it was mine. But one interesting thing about our relationship is that she and I are from different generations. I’m a Gen-Xer and she’s Generation Jones. Steve, who also reads this blog, is too.
Phrases such as Baby Boomers, the Beat Generation, Millennials and Generation X are all well-known, and I think probably all coined by journalists. However, there doesn’t seem to be a popular term for the people born between the Baby Boom and Gen-X. Consequently the term “Generation Jones”, which refers to these people, doesn’t seem to be widely known. This actually reflects the essence of Generation Jones as a group of people who have tended to miss out and be ignored by things. The generation before and after them are connected to each other. Here’s a graph of the birth rate in the UK from 1940 CE to the 2010s:
The Baby Boom is really clear. It stands out on the graph, and it also seems to have two peaks, perhaps for when eldest and second children were born. Gen-X is also fairly clear and can be seen as the single, gentler slope up and down peaking in the mid-1960s. It’s a smoother curve because it represents a different kind of generation. People seemed to have had children when they were about twenty according to this graph, although they tended to wait longer before they settled down and the double peak after the War is also manifested in the fact that these are people of varying ages. There is then a rapid decline into the mid-’70s followed by a less regular, shallower and longer peak from about 1979 to 2000, then another even vaguer peak around 2010. This represents the smearing of ages which occurs in generations. If you have a 23andme account, you can see this in estimates of your ancestry, which get longer in duration the further back in time you go. If you imagine the average age of a parent to be twenty-three (this is roughly three score years and ten divided by three) but possibly as young as eighteen or as old as twenty-eight, that gives the generation before you a range of ten years, the generation before that a range of thirty and the one before that of half a century. There was a specific, definite event just after the War which is becoming smoothed out by this effect, meaning that the age distribution of society is returning to how it was before the Second World War.
Gen-Xers are the children of Baby Boomers. This is not precisely true, but it is a fair guide to where the peak of that generation occurs. However, we are the peak generations in terms of our population. Generation Jones is in the trough. This may give them common ground with people born in the late 1970s. It means that culture was more youth oriented before and after they were young, because there were more young people at that time, but not for them. The Swinging ’60s were something exciting happening to older people and the Yuppies and the Second Summer Of Love happened after they’d got past the point when they could enjoy such things. Generation Jones, sadly, occupies a dip.
I’m aware that I’m talking about this second hand. I am not myself a member of this generation, although because my parents were older than average when I was born, and also late adopters, I might have more in common with them than many of my contemporaries. If my mother had me when she was 23, I would’ve been born in 1956. This is a peculiar counterfactual conditional but I’m going to let it pass, because I think you know what I’m saying. I think I’m a mixture for this reason, and it may be a factor in Sarada and I being together. Just to make a general point about the situation, if a couple have a big age difference, maturity and life stages are not the only factors in making productive or problematic differences between them. Being in different generations can be equally important. A fairly trivial example of this in our own relationship is that I like music videos and Sarada hates them, and this is purely a generational difference. In the past I could also have noted that people say exactly the same things about The Smiths and Leonard Cohen except that I actually think Leonard Cohen is bloody brilliant and am completely disillusioned by Morrissey’s recent behaviour, so that doesn’t really work.
The term “Generation Jones” was coined by Jonathan Pontell (I have very little idea who that is by the way, and this time Google is not my friend) as a way of pointing out that Boomers and Gen-Xers peak far apart and there was a distinct experience pertaining to people born between 1954 and 1965. These people were children during Watergate and stagflation, that is, an economic situation where unemployment and inflation are both high, distinctive of the ’70s and having an obvious major influence on family life. Divorce was also becoming more common at this time, as were single mothers. In America, a lot of Gen-Xers would’ve grown up in an atmosphere of cynicism about politics because of Watergate. In Britain it would’ve included the Three Day Week and powercuts, but on a different note we all remember the summer of ’76, though how formative that is I don’t know. Jonesers tend to be pessimistic, cynical and distrust government. This actually doesn’t sound like Sarada at all.
Why is it called Jones? Well, they’re also known as the Lost Generation, which makes more sense to me at least, because they’ve missed out. But apparently it’s because they “jones” a lot, meaning that they hanker after the more prosperous and optimistic past of recent memory which they saw disappear as they reached adolescence. There’s also the aspect of “keeping up with the Joneses”, i.e. trying to be as “good” as the people next door, in this case temporally because their neighbours are the Baby Boomers and perhaps also us lot, the Gen-Xers. They had high expectations as children which were dashed as they reached adulthood. For us, that didn’t happen because we basically can’t remember the ’60s so we are strangers to that wave of optimism and are used to hopelessness. Most of them are not the children of people who fought in the War or were on the Home Front at that time, although some are. Another link with the name Jones is that it’s one of those very common surnames which is used to suggest anonymity, because these people are not seen, recognised or noticed.
Four out of five Jonesers do not identify with either Boomers or Gen-Xers. They tend to be less idealistic than their predecessors. They’re used to struggling to find work or make money from what they do. They experienced the loss of secure employment. After retirement, many of them wish to reconnect with the optimism and idealism they experienced second-hand in their childhood. They want to do it themselves rather than just watching others do it. There’s a sense of constant unrequited craving in their lives. Their reminiscence bumps would range from 1969-79 to 1980-90. The very different characters of the ’70s and ’80s suggests that they themselves might be divisible into two halves.
They’re said to be more practical and rational in their approach to change because they were forced to be pragmatic by conditions in their early adulthood. They dislike high-pressure sales techniques and are more likely to do digital detoxes because they have extensive experience of the pre-Web world as adults. Some of them see themselves as pioneers because they were forced to make things work after the old world had changed due to what the Boomers had done and due to the collapse of Keynesian economic policies.
So far so good then in this outline, but in my mind there’s a problem or two with this idea. One is that it reads a little like a horoscope. It kind of feels sufficiently vague and maybe flattering in a way, perhaps “sympathetic” is a better word, that most people would feel it describes them. The second problem is that to a great extent it feels like it describes me even if it is specific to Generation Jones. This might be due to me being Generation X, but older than most of my cohort, being born in 1967, making me almost a Joneser, and also possibly connected to my parents being older than average for a Gen-Xer’s. I can also see some of it in Sarada but not all, but then why would I? Everyone is also an individual.
I want to end this post by addressing Jonesers personally, as people with direct experience of being from this generation. In particular, I’m talking to you, Sarada, and you, Steve, but anyone else is free to respond too. Do you feel that this is you? Does it chime with you? Or is it more like a load of things cobbled together which could apply to anyone? How do you see me, as a Gen-Xer, as different or similar to this?
A Box Of Chocolates 