Work is plusplus cool

[burnunit]

So at my work, I get to occasionally engage in research and bigger picture kind of thinking in a way I can't do at other jobs. And I get pretty good access to our leadership in order to do that. I get to look into stuff that interests me and sometimes it can be turned into helpful insights we can use in our work, or sometimes not. So I had an email exchange with the President that went more or less as follows (did some editing) and whether or not it's just us shooting the breeze, I feel like I figured something out that was nagging my brain:

Remember when we were talking yesterday about [client] and you, and about our generational differences? I really gave that a lot of thought.

I think there's something that people don't talk about, that gets missed in all the talk like "gosh there sure are some differences between Generation X and the Boomers!" I'm sure you've thought about this but just bear with me: life expectancy has increased.

In Classical Greece, the life expectancy was 28. By Medieval England, a thousand or more years later, it was 33, and by the end of the 19th century it was only 37. By 1940, it was 65. At present it is almost 80.

It took us two thousand years to add 9 years to the mean human lifespan. In the last hundred, we've tacked on an additional 40.

In the past each generation was basically the offspring of the prior generation. This just stands to reason because the childbearing years of those prior generations were foreshortened by the lifespan. Biologically humans are able to give birth as soon as puberty commences, roughly at age 12. But even if they started so ridiculously young, our forebears were only able to reproduce for 16 years or so. Medicine has now enabled women to safely bear children into their forties. That's 30 years of childbearing ability.

"Cultural generations" happen every 20-30 years. We now have biological generations giving birth to more than one cultural generation.

While they are precessional to Generation X, Baby Boomers are generally not the "parents" of Generation X. It could be said that they are the elder siblings. Certainly that's not universally true-- but my parents have two Gen X and three Baby Boom kids. I can keep finding examples of families that have children from different cultural eras.

WHY are there the kinds of tensions that exist between Boomers and Xers? Because they're our big brothers and sisters, much much more so than they are our parents.

It's probably the exact same reason many of us fear and/or loathe Generation Y, because a few of us are siblings to them. But any of us are also aunts and uncles to them--I have nieces and nephews who are strong Y kids, now living as adults and taking some of the jobs we hated when we were just getting out of college.

I don't know what all this means, and it may not be a blinding insight, but I think it speaks to me about one very key reason "why we hate you" (which isn't true, of course, but honest to Gawwwd! Sometimes you just make us CRAZY!!)

She emailed back
"You drive me crazy. That's what I think.
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld. "

I claim victory.

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[unclebastard.livejournal.com]

On a semi-related note, I was at a used bookstore on Saturday and came across a paperback entitled Generation X.

It was from the 60s, and was about leather-clad biker youths.

Take that Douglas Coupland!