›› South Carolina Young Adults Count State Report

Introduction: Appendix A

Portraits of Generation X Young Adults

It is important to distinguish between subjective statements by young adults themselves and descriptions of young adults in the media, academia, and elsewhere by older observers who have usually been members of the Boomer generation. The external, though undoubtedly not very objective, viewpoints have generally been critical. An excellent example was the July 16, 1990 issue of TIME magazine which announced the arrival of the Generation X/Babybusters as young adults:

This is the twenty-something generation, those 48 million young Americans ages 18 through 29 who fall between the famous baby boomers and the boomlet of children the baby boomers are producing. Since today's young adults were born during a period when the U.S. birthrate decreased to half the level of its postwar peak, in the wake of the great baby boom, they are sometimes called the baby busters. By whatever name, so far they are an unsung generation, hardly recognized as a social force or even noticed much at all...

...And anyone who expected they would echo the boomers who came before, bringing more of the same attitude, should brace for a surprise. This crowd is profoundly different from - even contrary to - the group that came of age in the 1960s and that celebrates itself each week on The Wonder Years and Thirtysomething. By and large, the 18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values of the baby boomers, viewing that group as self-centered, fickle, and impractical.

(Gross and Scott, 1990, p. 57)

In their media debut, the Generation X/Babybusters were most easily defined for what they were not: they were not Babyboomers. But observers like TIME have tried to capture their character and culture in terms of their defining generational personality traits:

They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers, and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix.

A prime characteristic of today's young adults is their desire to avoid risk, pain and rapid change. They feel paralyzed by the social problems they see as their inheritance: racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits.

Twentysomething adults feel the opposing tugs of making money and doing good works, but they refuse to get caught up in the passion of either one. They reject 70-hour workweeks as yuppie lunacy, just as they shrink from starting another social revolution. Today's young adults want to stay in their own backyard and do their work in modest ways. 'We're not trying to change things. We're trying to fix things,' says Anne McCord, 21, of Portland, Ore. 'We are the generation that is going to renovate America. We are going to be its carpenters and janitors.'

This is a back-to-basics bunch that wishes life could be simpler. 'We expect less, we want less, but we want less to be better,' says Devin Schaumburg, 20, of Knoxville. 'If we're just trying to pick up the pieces, put it all back together, is there a label for that?'

(Gross and Scott, 1990, p. 57)

It is one thing to be defined as post-Boomers or anti-Boomers; however, what irritated the struggling young adults of the Babybust cohort was criticism that they were whiners, unaspiring workers, and even reluctant to become grown-ups:

What worries parents, teachers and employers is that the latest crop of adults wants to postpone growing up. At a time when they should be graduating, entering the work force and starting families of their own, the twentysomething crowd is balking those rites of passage. A prime reason is their recognition that the American Dream is much tougher to achieve after years of housing-price inflation and stagnant wages. Householders under the age of 25 were the only group during the 1980s to suffer a drop in income, a decline of 10%. One result: fully 75% of young males 18 to 24 years old are still living at home, the largest proportion since the Great Depression.

In a TIME/CNN poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, 65% of those surveyed agreed it will be harder for their group to live as comfortably as previous generations. While the majority of today's young adults think they have a strong chance of finding a well-paying and interesting job, 69% believe they will have more difficulty buying a house, and 52% say they will have less leisure time than their predecessors. Asked to describe their generation, 53% said the group is worried about the future.

(Gross and Scott, 1990, pp. 58)

Young adult writers have tended to respond to such criticism from a defensive posture, claiming that they were victims of circumstance. During the recession-prone 1980s and early 1990s, they maintained that their problems with work, income, marriage, and returning home resulted from of lack of opportunity in the economy and from the way they were brought up by their parents and society. David Lipsky and Alexander Abrams in Late Bloomers (pp. 9-57) made the following points about young adults in the early 1990s:

• Many external problems have caused the difficulties of these young adults.
• Baby Boomers never wanted to grow up; the new generation primarily wanted the opportunity to become grown-ups.
• If the economy comes back, these young adults will show the values Americans have always shown.
• Money has always been important, but young adults are not fixated on becoming rich. They simply want to "get out from under."
• Current work, family, and living problems would have been less painful if these young adults had not wanted to achieve adult status so soon.
• The current generation of young adults has done what they were supposed to do to succeed and didn't get the reward.
• Almost identical media criticisms of the Boomers were published in the 1970s.

Geoffrey Holtz in Welcome to the Jungle (pp. 142-208) presented a more positive and less defensive self-portrait of 1990s young adults, including the following traits:

• candor
• desire for freedom to choose; lack of herd mentality
• self-reliance and selective pragmatism
• desire for accomplishment and sense of contribution, but not toward their corporate employers, since potential for advancement no longer exists
• alternative lifestyles and values because conventional options are not available
• opposition to government because young adults want freedom to choose…and wish to protect the same rights for others
• fatalism generally, but optimism about their own future
• humor, satire, and self-aware irony
• entrepreneurial spirit
• cynicism which led to survival
• no pipe-dreams to shatter

In retrospect, these reports were strongly influenced by the economic problems of the 1980s and early 1990s. It is likely that books on young adults written after the economic boom of the late 1990s will present a different portrait with greater optimism about the transition from youth to adulthood.

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