The Authors
Coupland
How do you identify?
How you identify has always been a big deal. In the late 1980s, I disliked being classified as a Baby Boomer so much that I had to invent my way out of it. My debut novel, published almost 35 years ago, was called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Why ‘accelerated’? By the tail end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, it felt as if history was finally emerging from a locked-in syndrome, and there was this new group of young people who obviously didn’t fit into any pre-existing category.
The false assumption of human sameness is a key factor in generational discussions. It has been entertaining to see the exact same venom that was thrown at Gen X being thrown at Millennials (Gen Y) and Gen Z: ‘they whine, they’re lazy, they’re useless’, and all of that. I think that kind of generation trashing is actually eternal human behaviour. Even Baby Boomers were picked on.
Three decades since Generation X came out, what’s changed? Well, Millennials are grown ups now, pop anthropology has moved on to scrutinizing the sensitivities of Gen Z. The things that become emblematic of a tribe are often unwitting. For Gen X, it was the flannel shirt. For Millennials, it was avocado toast, and for Gen Z, it is despising avocado toast and skinny jeans.
Today, I wonder how much of what we call a generation is simply a matter of the temporal cohort’s exposure to technology during pre-pubescent neural wiring and living through global financial cycles.
What next? Kids educated through Zoom classes during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown have been referred to as ‘Generation C’. There’s the emergence of ‘Ozempic Babies’, unexpected pregnancies stemmed by Ozempic interfering oral birth control medication. The first generation whose lives will have been fully intertwined with the existence of artificial intelligence graduates high school in 2030 — ‘Gen AI’?
I haven’t been employed since 1988. I’m still trying to recover from the trauma. Sometimes I wake up and think: ‘Oh my God, I don’t have a job’. By your thirties you should be doing whatever it is you’re suppose to be doing with your life and just get on with it — which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else. My life has been a vocation since Generation X was published two months after my 30th birthday. I’ve never had a good answer when asked if Generation X actually existed and who were they, although as shorthand, I said that if you liked the Talking Heads back in the day, then you’re probably Gen X. Baby Boomers had Forrest Gump and ‘Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch’, — I mean, good for them, because have and enjoy your generation! — but please don’t tell me that includes me too. The whole point of Gen X was a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one’s will. Millennials are more lovable than Gen X, because the parents of Millennials are the Baby Boomers. Millennials act as their mirror and shadow, thus offering them a bonus extra channel through which they can discuss and view themselves. In a demographic sense, Millennials really are a generation, while Gen X is only a psychographic. Millennials don’t perceive a job as being a guarantee of long- term security — that’s a profound difference. There was a point when the idea of the job for life disintegrated. Now no one has any expectation of lifetime employment. Gen Z has to be wondering what work skills will be truly future-proof from total automation.
Work as we know it is coming to an end, as cloud-based technologies and ever faster download speeds are making the office obsolete. Our working days are becoming interspersed with leisure and home activities. All generations will need to learn to adapt to a freeform schedule, which will present a psychological challenge to those who crave structure. The future will not have the nine to five. Instead, the whole day will include other parts of your life. Scheduling will become freedom. In the same way the industrial revolution led to the creation of the weekend as a break from work, the cloud is altering our work schedule. In the future, everyday of the week is going to be a Wednesday. There will be no more weekends, it’ll be one smooth flow. I wish I could say that in the future there will be no meetings, but there will always be meetings.
Do people want to be in a job-job? No, but while most people like the notion of free time, actually having to deal with filling it is horrible. We no longer need to remember long strings of phone numbers or directions from the airport. Why bother to remember anything? Our brains are liberated from these things. We have the present and the future all at the same time. I think it’s one of the most profound neurological changes in human history — all generations have now turned into Millennials.
I thought that the internet was a metaphor for life; now I think that life is a metaphor for the internet. I was in China researching for a book at a router-making factory in suburban Shanghai, and I met this one guy, Peter. The fact that he even has an English first name is a big break from the past. He had this picture of his son, who was 7 or 8, on a frame in this office desk, and I asked him, ‘What’s the difference between him at that age and you at that age?’ And he said, ‘Well that’s easy: he knows that the internet is the real world.’ Is this iGen?
Human beings weren’t built for progress — maybe a bit of change here, a bit of adaptability there, but not for what every generation living and working together is now collectively enduring. No animal is built that way. Until recently we lived in a cave or a hut and assumed our great- great-grandchildren would be living in the same cave or hut identical to our own; their lives would be in no way different from ours.
I don’t think people being on their devices all the time is an indicator of social isolation. It’s the opposite. In Manhattan about one person in three on any given sideway is using a device. Some people say that’s bad because they’re not ‘in the moment’, but I think it’s kind of nice because you have visible proof that people need and want to be in any sort of way with other people. Once you get used to a certain online connection, there’s just no way to go back to where you were before. In the 1980s I lived and worked in Japan during the ascension years of Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo. Japan had found its own voice, which was a voice that emerged from the rubble of World War II. I remember an interview with Miyake where he said that the only way he could work was to go forward, that as a child he had seen the world go up in flames and he wanted nothing to do with a world that would do that to itself. That always struck me as smart. The past is always going to be there, but the reason we have the future is to make sure that we can do better than the past.
We now live in an age where older individuals (Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y) are stripped of pre-existing romantic notions of identity, and are then more or less involuntarily reconfigured as ‘atomized people units’. Young people (Gen Z), on the other hand, become atomized people units from the cradle onward. This sounds dark, but it need not be so. It is simply new, and for most people in the world, electronically joining the rest of humanity is a major upgrade. But it is not just people that are being re-tooled and re-formatted. All forms of collectivity are being atomized and re-linked in new modes: countries, religions, universities, and businesses. Maybe we’re all turning into Gen Z.
With young people there’s always been this impulse to rebel, but at the same time, they rebel by being fantastically homogeneous. To want to forget about rebellion in its entirety, and just to want to be like other people, that’s new, and it’s not superimposed from above, like in a Stalinist state — Gen Z has self imposed and it’s coming from the collective. It’s kind of shocking actually.
I’m 62 and almost a half years old and these days I no longer feel that I identify as a human being. I’ve turned into an app. I’m a filter for the way I experience the world. I was born in the 20th century at a specific moment in human history where my brain was exposed to television, film, music, literature, and then, starting in the late 80s, digital technologies. Now I see myself as an app, I see one of my jobs as to explain the old era to the new era, but there’s nothing quite so micro-humiliating as making a Brady Bunch reference and the room going silent. Generations are united and divided over sentimental markers much more now than when they were born.
I wonder at what point people stop being people, the exact reversal process of watching newborns become adults. I’m dealing with the elderly much more, Baby Boomers, and I live in dread of the day someone close to me no longer knows who anyone is. Maybe it’s the same with generations. We don’t really know when one generation ends and the next one begins. We try and predict the pleasures and hardships they’ll have to endure, but it’s the unintended consequences of the present that dictate the future.
So to all the generations, "Alone, we can only move buckets. But if we work together, we can drain rivers.”, as said by Mike Brady. Mike Brady — hello? Anyone, anyone?