Let’s face it, not many young people appreciate baby boomers. And it turns out that even boomers don’t like boomers.

While over half of millennials and 42% of Gen Xers say boomers have “made their lives worse,” nearly a third of boomers feel the same way.

What is the source of boomer-boomer bitterness? It could very well be Generation Jones.

A generation hidden within a generation, the “Jones Generation” is a term social commentators attach to younger, tail boomers—people who came of age in the disco, punk, and Watergate-obsessed 1970s rather than the spawn of hippies; protest against the Vietnam War; sex, drugs and rock and roll in the 1960s.

Yonzers resents being mixed with flower boomers. They feel they have little in common and cultural touchstones with the rowdy cohort that has eclipsed them.

Name Jones — coined by cultural critic Jonathan Pontell in 1999 — refers to the idea of ​​”keeping up with the Joneses” as well as drug use slang for “joking around” or craving more.

The Jones Generation makes up approximately 53 million of the 76 million people of the Boomer Generation. Philadelphia and its four counties have about 593,000 Generation Jones members (66%), compared to about 302,000 older boomers (34%), according to data analyzed for The Inquirer by Allen Glicksman of NewCourtland, a Germantown agency that helps older people. . .

Older boomers born between 1946 and 1953 are now between 70 and 77 years old. The Jones generation arrived between 1954 and 1964 (some say 1965) and are between 59 and 69 years old. The group includes Madonna, Magic Johnson, Bill Gates, Princess Diana, and Barack Obama, who once declared himself “the first president of the Jones generation.”

Analysts say that while many of Jones’s residents have been financially successful, the bulk of them have been hit by an economy that changed dramatically as they came of age and eventually bypassed them entirely. A sense of abandonment, a kind of brew in the culture of discontent that helped split America into warring tribes.

Also, as the Jonesers begin to retire, many face financial uncertainty that their older brethren never had.

Leisure Suits

Darlene M. Temple, 65, of West Mount Airy, who retired from an executive role at Amtrak, said she never felt connected to the baby boom generation.

“I knew nothing about Woodstock or the shooting at Kent State University. [University],” she said. “When I grew up in Mount Airy, there were no riots like in the 60s, I was not a hippie, I did not smoke refrigerated trucks.”

Her husband, Mark, also 65 and former executive director of the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Center, agreed: “The Vietnam War ended when I was in 11th grade. It was the group before me.”

Susan Meyer, 63, who taught philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, said she was “shocked to be classed as boomers, the boastful generation that has taken over the entire cultural space.”

Then the elderly boomers “became dinosaurs, and the country started talking about millennials.”

“I was like, ‘What about me? Meyer said.

Then, of course, there were leisure suits and Disco Inferno.

“In the 1970s, clothes were terrible,” says Sharon Dietrich, 62, an attorney with Community Legal Services. “And almost none of that shit came back.

However, Dietrich was jealous of the music of the 1960s – the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison. “We had this terrible disco.”

As Generation Jones grew older, they changed boomer politics along with music. They turned out to be more Republican and conservative than the older boomers and are said to have helped elect George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Despite this, political analysts say, many Jones voters are swing voters actively courted by both parties.

Cynicism and disappointment

When the members of Generation Jones came of age in the 1970s, according to Temple University professor Bryant Simon, “the political relevance of the 1960s and the sense of unity were gone.”

The inspiring cause of the era – the Vietnam War – ended, and later boomers who did not fight or protest against it began a new era, dubbed “the decade of me.” According to writer Tom Wolfe, it was marked by narcissism and a lack of social caring. It was, of course, the generation that produced the yuppies in the 1980s.

As Johnser and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan (a Valley Forge native) wrote in the New York Times in 2020, “if the boomer zeitgeist was optimism and revolution, General Jones’ atmosphere was one of cynicism and disillusionment.” She quoted journalist Richard Pérez-Peña, who wrote that, being older Boomers “may have wanted to change the world… most of my peers just wanted to change the channel.”

According to economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, this attitude has helped many members of Generation Jones succeed financially.

But not everyone flourished. The Jones generation graduated from high school and college in a 1970s-80s economy marked by high unemployment, wage stagnation, weakened unions, and a shift from manufacturing to a service economy.

Simon, 61, who grew up in Vineland, New Jersey, said many of the Jones workers he knew felt left out by the changing economy.

A “white fragility” has developed among them, which breeds anger at being left behind.

Indeed, some of the mafia that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were Jones supporters, fueled by 40 years of resentment, analysts say.

“It could be argued,” Simon concluded, “that, after all, it was this generation that created the split we have in America today.”

Although many members of Generation Jones have retired, according to David Yamada, a professor of law at Suffolk University in Boston, most of them are still “striving for it.”

And that’s the problem.

Yamada said that many Jones residents “will face the coming retirement savings crisis. I’m very concerned about what their future life will look like.”

Generation Jones is the first group of Americans to rely on 401(k) retirement plans rather than fixed pensions. More than 40 years ago, employers began to shift the market risk of accumulating retirement benefits onto their employees, Anki Chen, an economist at Boston College, said in an interview.

After the Great Recession, many of these people had lower incomes, less 401(k) participation and fixed 401(k) balances, Chen added. And they have suffered another blow from the recent market downturns.

Combine 401(k) dependency with cut Social Security payments over the years, and you can see where aging members of Generation Jones could be worse off than their parents, said economist Teresa Gilarducci of the New School for Social Research.

One result: “This generation will continue to work longer,” said Loyola University sociologist Rhys Williams.

Sharon Dietrich of CLS said she describes her life: “I’ve lost so much on my 401(k) in the last 18 months that I’m going to have to keep going, just to restore it.”

She is not alone.

“Apparently,” she said, “for many children of the 70s, the future is uncertain.”

Content Source