Talkin’ ‘Bout Sarada’s Generation

Legs & Co dancing to Kool & The Gang on TOTP in 1981

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?

Wasting Time

A long time ago, I was officially unemployed, meaning that nobody was paying me for my work. I used to look for ads in newspapers, go down the Job Centre and look at the cards, take them to the desk, you know the drill, but there was a major problem with that last bit: only very rarely was it possible to know which employer was advertising. And to me, this was vitally important, and I presume it was to others, because if you don’t know who you might be working for, you’re unlikely to know the ethical consequences of taking the job. For instance, if there was an ad for a short-order cook, it might be for McDonalds or for a vegan takeaway, and the two are polar opposites.

On another occasion, after I’d got my MA, I remember a discussion with an employee at the Job Centre who said I wouldn’t want to waste my degree by doing something or other, I can’t remember what. I replied that I didn’t do the Masters to increase my income, and he was completely flabbergasted and speechless. But I didn’t, and in fact it seems to me that the best candidate for a job is not primarily motivated by how high their income would be, but by how much of a positive difference they could make to the world by doing the work required for the post.

I needn’t have worried in fact because it turned out that for whatever reason, regardless of how much effort and thought I threw at the problem of finding paid work with an employer, it just never happened, so in the end I decided to become self-employed. This worked a little better. I’d say that the fundamental difference between being self-employed (and freelance as opposed to getting most of your work from the same source) and an employee is that in the latter case you have to persuade an expert at recruitment and HR that you’re worth paying, but you only have to do it once, and in the former case you have to persuade an amateur potential employer, but you have to do it over and over again, or at least come up with a way that amateur potential employers become persuaded to do so.

However, that wasn’t the end of my troubles by any means. There could be said to be two types of paid work: useful and useless. That’s not actually strictly true, but I need to simplify things to explain this. Useful work may even be essential, for instance sanitation is vital in an urban society of our kind because otherwise everyone dies of dysentery and other nasties. It’s been said that only a slave has no right to withhold their labour, and I agree with this but this isn’t about withholding labour so much as the dynamic that goes on between a freelance provider of goods or services and their potential client. If the client needs your service, you are in a sense holding them to ransom by not doing it for free. This may not be a problem if everyone has their own turf and protects it, and everyone needs everyone else’s skills, but this isn’t so. They also don’t necessarily have the money. It’s also in your immediate interests not to educate the client so she can acquire the skills for herself and to reduce her confidence in her own ability to do it for herself. There are other ways of looking at this. For instance, someone may simply not have the time to do the housework, so you could get paid to do it instead, but the problem does exist where people often perceive value in skill, training and experience. At the opposite pole, there’s “useless” work, by which I mean art and entertainment, which however isn’t literally useless. However, it can be interchangeable in a way “useful” work isn’t. For instance, it could be said that the utility of reading a novel is that it increases empathy, and presumably different novels or genres encourage different aspects of this. However, if you prefer work by one novelist over another, it is still going to develop your empathy, though maybe in a different way. Hence there’s an interchangeability which doesn’t apply to “useful” work because the skill and experience involved is very variable. Therefore, when people buy a novel, pay to watch a concert and so forth, they may find it useful but that’s not the main point and it doesn’t mean anyone gets held to ransom if the artist concerned doesn’t do it. For this reason, “useless” work is better than “useful”.

There is a problem with this though. It assumes that there is no art or skill involved in apparently useful work, and this is by no means so. Medicine, for example, is a creative and artistic activity, and so I imagine is working down a sewer. But there seems to be a balance between the essential side of paid work and the artistic side. However, much of this could be circumvented by universal basic income, although whether that will ever happen is another question. There is another problem though: the System.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the situation is like Nazi Germany, where almost any kind of paid work would be a way of supporting the Third Reich and was therefore wrong, but there are problems with participating in a system which is doing so much damage to the biosphere, planet and human race, and it is almost impossible for many people to find jobs which don’t do more harm than good. Even if you find one, you then have the problem that you’re spending money in an exploitative system. Given this, “wasting time” can be seen as subversive because it means you aren’t contributing to that system. In particular, then, wasting time is a kind of oxymoron. It often applies to situations where if you were doing something “productive” instead you’d be hastening the apocalyptic destruction of the human race and encouraging the suffering of others.

At this point, I should probably inject a note of caution. It’s very easy to pontificate from the outside without wanting to get your hands dirty and be all self-righteous, and what I’ve just written probably does at least sound like that even if it isn’t actually that. Here’s a remarkably vague statement for you to consider: doing things tends to have an effect on the world. Often in fact it doesn’t, but sometimes it does, particularly when you’re surrounded by somewhat organised, concerted and focussed effort. And here’s the thing. If you do a lot of stuff, some of it is likely to have a negative effect. Obviously multinational corporations are a great evil, but one of the reasons for this is not that they are bent on profit and growth at all costs, although of course they are, but that they are very active and large. The sheer number of things they do is bound to result in some of them being bad. The same applies to governments, particularly of large countries. And if the alternative is doing nothing, that doesn’t stop the doers from messing things up. I can’t think of a large political party with substantial representation in parliament or local government which hasn’t done terrible things, and this, I think, is inevitable simply due to large scale activism or activity. One solution might be to scale things down, but that then allows sociopathic and psychopathic individuals to dominate activity in “small ponds”. There also seems to be another issue with large organisations. Once the situation arises where people within an organisation lack contact with its public face and ostensive purpose, the complexity leads to ignorance of the wider significance of one’s actions. The organisation you think is good is the one you aren’t well-acquainted with. Certain charities come to mind here, except that given that some of them do more harm than good, ineffective money-wasting charities can be a good thing because they’re doing less damage. However, it probably is sometimes better to do something rather than nothing.

Consequently, I would strongly defend uselessness and timewasting, but as usual it depends on how you define those things. Also, I’m reluctant to be too critical of large bodies which have a devastating and probably homicidal and ecocidal destructive influence on the world, because that’s an emergent property of activity on a large scale. But I don’t believe even slightly in the work ethic, although I do believe work with a purpose is good for mental health, and I don’t think anyone should be forced to work just to survive because everyone has infinite value and doesn’t need to justify their existence. I also think work is part of human essence, but that’s a topic for another post. For here, it basically means laziness is very often an illusion, and there is just paid and unpaid work. But the more useful you are, the more potential for harm you have.