13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?

• Author: Hirschorn, Michael

"Imagine arriving at a beach at the end of a long summer of wild goings-on. The beach crowd is exhausted, the sand shopworn, hot, and full of debris--no place for walking barefoot. You step on a bottle and a cop yells at you for littering. The sun is directly overhead and leaves no patch of shade that hasn't already been taken. You feel the glare beating down on a barren landscape devoid of secrets or innocence. You look around at the disapproving faces and can't help but sense that, somehow, the entire universe is gearing up to punish you."

This image forms the thesis of Neil Howe and Bill Strauss's 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, the latest effort to make hay out of the putative disenfranchisement of the generation of Americans born between 1961 and 1981. A book-long essay confected out of the vast wasteland of demographic studies, surveys, newspaper and magazine clippings, movies, music, advertising, and other ephemera, 13th Gen purports to provide what marketers like to call a "psychographic" profile of the 80 million Americans born in that two-decade period. The thesis, more or less, is that this generation, of which I am a part, is a group of fully ironized, badly educated, dysfunctional underachievers who nonetheless have embraced the role of cleaning up the mess older generations have left behind. The title of this book is an effort to fashion a buzzword out of the authors' calculation that this is the 13th generation in American history (they wrote a book last year called Generations, which casts the entire history of America in generational terms.) The neologism is an annoying contrivance. It clangs like a bungled ad line, and there's nothing we "13ers" hate more than bad marketing, you know. Reading this endless skein of cutesy, facile generalizations, I found myself repeatedly choking back the bile. I mean, who do these people think they are?

"Thirteeners are cursed with the lowest collective self-esteem of any youth generation in living memory," Howe and Strauss write with the kind of blase self-confidence that characterizes this whole book. Elsewhere: "You just have to imagine"--do we really?--"a TV-glued 13er audience nodding in response to Jay Leno's line about why teenagers eat Doritos Tortilla Chips: |Hey kids! We're not talkin' brain cells here. We're talkin' taste buds.'" Or, here, describing 13ers'--my--feelings about the workplace: "Like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future in most 13ers would be unfazed to learn that the boss who fires them 20 years from now will be a Japanese businessman wearing a thousand-dollar suit."...