I love when I’m trending! You can hardly imagine my joy when, this month, a bunch of culture articles lit up the wires…and the news was all about me! What’s the scoop? Turns out, I’m a Xennial, and I didn’t even know it.
For those of you who have been lucky enough all these years to have a generation of your own, be it boomer, Generation X or Millennial, you have no idea how satisfying it is to finally have a generational home and not feel like some sort of misfit tweener. It’s sort of like how I lived on Mission Street for 13 years on a corner where no one could agree what neighborhood it belonged to—Bernal Heights, Glen Park, St. Mary’s, Deep Mission. So many inane conversations were had over this. It would have felt so good to just say I lived in the Mission.
Folks born between 1977 and 1983 have been newly categorized into a so-called “micro-generation,” dubbed the Xennials. Those of us who came to fruition during the same time span as the original Star Wars trilogy have long been uneasy with our ill fit in relation to Generation X or Generation Y (a.k.a., the Millennials). I can’t relate to either even remotely. All this time, I thought the idea of clumping people into generations was pointless and dumb—about as useful as the zodiac on a Chinese restaurant placemat.
“You’re a Gen Y? Cool…I’m an Ox.”
In case you’re not up to speed on this whole Xennial business, here’s a good article in Vogue (and I thought that magazine was all advertisements) about who came up with the designation and what it means.
I gotta admit, the Xennial designation works. It fits for both my wife and me, out at either end of the Xennial age range. It feels like magic to be lumped into a generalized demographic that somewhat accurately reflects my reality. Coming of age during the transition from the analog to the digital world has shaped who I am.
10,000 Hours @ 1200 Baud
Here’s another generalization about my Xennial breathren: a lot of us had an unfathomable amount of time sucked away from us as the beta testers for this digital revolution. Stuff works now because we spent so much time debugging it.
Landline telephones were a reliable technology. The system worked fine most of the time. Fast-forward to today. The iPhones and Amazons and such of 2017 work pretty darn seamlessly. Click. Click. Watch. Listen. Buy. Repeat. But for the 20+ years or so in between, our transition to seamless tech ecosystems was buggy as hell.
Malcolm Gladwell famously talks about the 10,000 hours one needs in order to master a task. It’s an overused reference, but we rarely talk about how the same rule applies to mastering certain kinds of flailing and/or failure. For me and my Xennial breathren, 10,000 hours doesn’t even come close to the amount of time we’ve spent languishing in tech limbo.
My first computer had a 20 MB hard drive and a 1200-baud modem. I learned DOS. When my state-of-the-art machine was having issues, I’d unscrew the hulking metal box on my desk, jiggle around the cards, blow dust off the connectors and sometimes get it working again. Nine years later, I took that same computer (with a few upgraded components) to college with me. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours and then some in becoming a master at watching things load, watching things connect, reading manuals, installing and reinstalling, rebooting, restarting, returning, reconfiguring, replugging, resaving, reuploading, redownloading, rewiring, restarting, restarting, restarting, restarting.
The spinning wheel of death. The frowny sick Mac face. The frozen screen. The fatal error. Bad file sectors. Dropped connections. iPhones and iTunes not syncing. I’ve become a Zen master of tech suffering—smiling, laughing and breathing deeply through the absurdity of it all—enlightened by the fact that this is all out of my control. Oblivious to what I might have been doing instead.
Even my mom
At some point all this tech stuff started working.I can’t even remember the last time I lost a significant amount of work. Mostly, things connect when they are supposed to. Upgrading software used to feel as dreadful as going in for heart surgery and took twice as long. Now it happens automatically. I haven’t had a computer die on me since at least two laptops ago…2010? (Knock on aluminum). Even my mom can use an iPad.
Assuming your private info isn’t ransomed by Azerbaijani cyber bandits, tech’s pretty seamless these days. And it works because I put in thousands of precious hours, multiplied by millions of people and their precious hours, predominantly powered by us Xennials. We thought we were just trying to research, write, save and print our term papers. But in that struggle, we were part of something much bigger. Was I tricked into it? Was this the plan all along? Did I get something out of it? Will my progeny revere me for my hardships?
“Grandpa, tell us about the time your G3 RAM module died in the middle of the big recording session and you had to be on the Apple help line for 3 hours…”
When you contemplate the totality of it all, it feels like something extremely valuable has been taken from me that I’ll never get back. Especially because I’m a liberal arts guy — not one of the programmers who cashed out and got rich.
Who’s pwnd now?
So what separates us Xennials from Milllennials?
Our mighty microchipped masters may have debugged the future on Xennial–powered time and energy, but Millennials? They’re the ones who are in the process of debugging human nature itself. The Millennial masses are all too willing to put in their 10,000+ hours clicking, liking, filtering and creating the most robust deanonymized data sets ever, so that eventually, it’ll not just be the iWatch / iPhone / Macbook ecosystem that’s seamlessly integrated into your life—your life itself will be integrated into their corporate systems so that the distinction between user and tool will grow ever less distinct. I guess that makes Millennials even more pwnd than I am, but that doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about the whole thing.
Beep Boop
