There are 80 million Gen Y to about 30 million Gen Xers, and it would appear that it is the overwhelming opinion of Gen X that their younger counterparts are… well… stupid, lazy, and weak. A generation just waiting to be told what to do, just to watch them do it poorly.
I rest firmly in that middle ground — Gen XY, the MTV Generation, you-name-it. Gen X in our mindset and approach, we are solidly familiar with everything Gen Y does and “speak the language” (spk teh lgng?) to a point. It’s the generation born between 1976 and 1982 that spans the gap.
What makes Gen XY so unique? We’re the folks who watched Soviet Communism fall. We drank in heavy doses of MTV. We watched fought the War on Terrorism when it was Cobra Commander and Destro threatening the world. We have seen the future of hidden technology — not RFIDs, but TransFormers and Voltron. We made the transition from Atari to Nintendo to PC with effortless ease. We programmed our own C64 games. We grew up with Ronald Reagan. We watched Reagan and Gorbachev hold summit after summit.
Overwhelmingly, we rock.
Gen Y may have it’s problems, but I wonder how much of that is because Gen X is so buttoned down and professional? True, straddling the fence has it’s advantages, but that is what makes the Gen XY/MTV Generation so uniquely positioned to take advantage of the best of both worlds.