From the moon to Mars: Why Gen X and millennials will never get each other
The reference to the moon and mars is to set a timeline for the two disparate groups of people we are talking about. The Gen Xers are those who were born around the moon landing; the millennials are those who have heard about the first Mars rover but couldn’t be bothered to follow it. (What’s the big deal in another rover taking selfies of the red planet! Just Google it dude!)
Some sociologists says that Gen Xers who are now in their 40s are the world’s least happy people (especially, professionally) and they cite plenty of reasons for it. They are overqualified, underpaid, laden with debt, not central to their organisation anymore and very resentful of the younger people who have neither the skills nor the depth for senior positions. Well, their fathers bought a home upon retirement and were most likely to have government jobs. This group of people grew up around frugality relying on their academic skills to break the middle class barrier through stellar education in top colleges and were self-made too. Most of the talent was homegrown but they became symbols of success despite odds like studying in Indian colleges, lack of international exposure or not being given the opportunity to further invest in their own careers.
But they persevered because they didn’t want a life like their fathers and mothers and they had the ability to take risk as their parents did not need them so much thanks to their pensions. But without the cushion of that lifelong pension and given the unstable nature of private companies, Gen Xers worried constantly about the security of their jobs, the men felt a little out considering they had working spouses (unlike their own mothers who weren’t employed outside the home), but gamely tried to lend a hand with the household chores as they were all new age couples. Gen X men and women ended up working for the first MNCs as liberalisation opened up the country and they had a marvellous run for 20 years or so till the millennials entered the workforce and proved to be more disruptive than big data.
But first a little more about the travails of the Gen Xers and why they feel left out and feel that bile of bitterness more than others. When they broke through the mist of work, they were the first to own a house and car due to liberal credit policies, take holidays overseas, send their kids to expensive private schools and buy more than one Apple product. They were rich and happy. And as home-grown talent they had a special place in the recruitment strategies of new age companies that looked at services and creativity in the global-local scenario.
Then, around the time of the great big crash of 2008, Gen Xers were left feeling bewildered.
They had headed divisions, were owners of platinum airmiles cards, business class lounge lizards, bought Italian ties and, yet, suddenly they had become as insignificant as dinosaurs. Enter the Powerpoint-sharp, attached-to-their-smartphone smooth-talking kids who had yet to learn how to shave and often did not (the bristle of the unshaven giving them much needed gravitas). They used SMS-style language, never wrote more than 50 words and were connected to the cloud, in the online world and in their own heads. It was exactly like the scenario in the final version of Rocky where Rocky is training the son of his first adversary and he sketches out a fitness schedule for the wannabe who doesn’t jot down a single word.
“Aren’t you going to make a note it,” says Balboa to which the cocky kid replies, “Hey I just put it up in the cloud,” and like his fellow Gen Xers, the Italian stallion looks up in the sky wondering where and what the cloud was!
That is how out of touch Gen Xers felt when millennials broke down the walls of the corner offices. The young ones could most certainly teach the oldies a thing or two, but what they lacked was any kind of reverence for what was going on before them! They didn’t think daddy and mommy had been doing much of a job and, hey, they would rather work for themselves – read start-ups – such an apt name! Or they would just snark at the generation before them as this was a way of validating their e-commerce sites or a slick smartphone on which they spent their entire first salary!
The tragedy was that the Gen Xers were not so out of touch, but that they lacked the pizzazz. They took their lives far too seriously, worried about their lifestyle costs and the bank balance that they stressed about in order to stay ahead all the time.
They were the ones who crowded the expensive executive management courses and read Warren Buffet and the GE handbook for entertainment. But for the millennials all this was passé, they reworked everything on a two inch by five inch screen and the Gen Xers had to first change the font size to see anything! And they didn’t know how to have fun at the office. There was worse.
The Gen Xers who were slowly being sidelined more due to their cost to company and the fact that 20-somethings could be hired at half their cost would take this very badly. They had loans – homes and cars – big credit card spends, tuition for two kids and they were being made to feel irrelevant. They felt insulted and humiliated and it made them bitter because they had to move aside not because they were not good enough, but they were not just cool enough anymore.
The millennials who had no such responsibilities couldn’t care less – a younger workforce was the mantra of the times and continues to be.
So the Gen Xers started moving back to traditional industries like manufacturing and automobiles, they even took pay cuts, but the other cuts were too deep to bear and they felt pained — especially because they worked so hard for it.
But this is the sign of the times. If we price ourselves out of the market, it is no one’s fault but ours when our tags become unsustainable in lean times.
We look at the younger generation as culprits and yes, they do lack in the reverence department and spend everything they have because they marry late and have zero responsibility. But the youth should not be blamed so much. Experience finds its own nook and here is another filmy angle: When Bond meets the new Q in a museum and is startled to see the spots, they both have the last word in that little exchange: that youth is no guarantee for innovation and age is no guarantee for experience. Touché .
It is just that once the moon was beyond reach and today even Mars is within sight.