Holy shit. I read the whole thing. All three parts. And despite my self-imposed exile, I want to talk about it. FIRST: There are a lot of words. They are not well organized. They sort of circle around a few topics: 1) We already have a social safety net, but it's ad-hoc and powered by distaste 2) The higher education system has failed systemically but it will take a generation to shake out so it's a good thing we got (1) 3) The system has evolved (1) organically to protect (2) 4) "Hipsters." Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who remembers the '90s. It might be because I was just coming to political consciousness when Newsweek was bitching about "Generation X" and what a shiftless bunch of ironic leeches we all were. I defy you to read the book we're named after and not see walls dripping in irony: That's a passage chosen at random. Written in 1991. See if you can spot the hipsters in here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDYGo0UgIVM Or fuck, how 'bout in here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9f9M6UAYb0 Now check this shit out. I'm gonna have to post that separately. HOLY FUCK: So what happened? Well, we invented the Internet. Not in a Tim Berners-Lee way but in a "we can buy and sell you from petty cash" way. Gerry Yang? GenX. Sergei Brin? GenX. All the money the Internet ever generated it generated because of GenX. Which made the 'Boomers STFU right quick. Now nobody even really remembers the phrase "Generation X" because we're the guys paying the bills while the 'boomers start collecting more social security than they put in. "Hipsters" have the deck stacked against them even more than GenX did. I caught the tail end of it - I voted in 1992, but by a scant week or two. I was one of the shining few who took the old SAT and the recentered SAT. I went to college before it came apart at the seams and had my first few jobs in the economy ruined by September 11. Apparently that makes my perspective unique. The kids are all right. That "social safety net" described in the linked article is a strawman. It's not steady-state. For one thing, unemployment doesn't last forever (trust me, I know). For another, the United States is busily dealing with "structural unemployment" - a lovely technical term for "jobs that are not coming back ever." It's going to be a long slow decline. Part of it is caused by those very "hipsters" - they don't buy much. They don't need cars. They use "irony" as an excuse to shop at thrift stores (hey, whatever works!). They support "hipster" restaurants, which is code for "keeps money closer to the point of sale" (85% of money generated by a franchise restaurant leaves the zip code of the franchise). And they deeply believe in the shit they buy, to a zealous degree. It's not exactly an anti-consumer mantra, but it certainly protects the local at the expense of the global. And the school thing can't continue. For one thing, Obama poked a big fucking hole in it through debt forgiveness. Some fun facts from my own life, excuse me for oversharing: My wife's doctorate cost $130k. She had a full ride to undergrad, as did I, so that's all the debt we got. Putting it on deferral for 12 months pushed it to $220k. So that's $100k in debt the "government" (more on that if asked) earned just by letting us get on our feet. We consolidated into an income matching program, the payments of which do not keep up with interest. By the time we hit Payment 360, at which point it all gets forgiven, our initial $130k debt will have ballooned to $2,600,000. But fuck you, we will have paid $163k. Fortunately she's in an "essential profession" which means that 360 payments gets cut to 120 payments half of which we've made. Here's the funny thing: the financial institutions we bank with consider that $2.6m income for purposes of banking. And I doubt we're the only ones. We've still got a house with renters in it up in Seattle. We refinanced from a 30 to a 15 and managed to keep the payments nearly the same - win/win. It's gonna be near-pure income right about the time my daughter starts looking for colleges. So we run some calcs to see how much 4.5 years of private school education is expected to cost when she's ready, and how much we need to set aside right now to get her there. The answer? "$2 million dollars" and "$1200 a month." Now, maybe there will be an education worth $2m in 2030. I doubt it. Even if there was, I'd be a lot more likely to buy my daughter a half-dozen Starbucks franchises and say "follow your bliss." And I can't be the only one looking at those numbers and deciding the system isn't sustainable. And maybe that's why I liked reading the article while also feeling like the article missed a whole bunch. For one thing, I've never met someone who describes themselves as a "hipster." It's a pejorative, not a class of people. For another thing, all this presumes that "hipsters" are helpless to their fate, that they're out of ideas or options, and that they aren't just as likely to subvert the paradigm and throw it in the faces of their parents as GenX did. Bill McKibben (GenX) argues in Eaarth that the way forward is distinctly hipster-like: Travel less, buy less, eat local whenever possible, use less energy and cultivate online relationships. Shannon Hayes (GenX) argues in Radical Homemakers that the way forward is to freeload until you have enough resources to live self-sufficiently off your own land. I know plenty of "hipsters" who know how to can vegetables. I know zero baby boomers who can do the same. I think it's gonna be okay. I really do. I think "ironically" working at a coffee shop is how you accept that your life isn't as rich as your parents' lives and it's probably their fault. But you know what? "Happiness is making more money than your brother-in-law." (Mencken) The standard of living is in decline. The "hipsters" are the vanguard and while you're looking down your nose at them, they're enjoying themselves. They will have the last laugh."Her hair was totally 1950s Indiana Woolworth perfume clerk. You know—sweet but dumb—she'll marry her way out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was early '60s Aeroflot stewardess—you know—that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral applique earrings that looked like antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa 1956. She really caught the sadness—she was the hippest person there. Totally."
Well, enough is enough. As a baby boomer, I'm fed up with the ceaseless carping of a handful of spoiled, self-indulgent, overgrown adolescents. Generation Xers may like to call themselves the "Why Me?" generation, but they should be called the "Whiny" generation. If these pusillanimous purveyors of pseudo-angst would put as much effort into getting a life as they do into writing about their horrible fate, we'd be spared the weekly diatribes that pass for reasoned argument in newspapers and magazines.