The Bridge Generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, photo essays, millennials, mini-biographies

This picture, taken twenty years ago, shows my father getting tips on cell phone usage from my son, a Millennial. My father, age 84 in this photo, is of the "Greatest Generation", the generation of World War II and the Korean War, and also of the GI Bill and Suburbia. 

I am a Boomer. Having a son when we were more than forty years old, my wife and I skipped a generation ("X") and produced a Millennial, who now has children of his own, and having skipped yet another generation ("Z"), they are of Generation Alpha. (And yes, I was nearly 75 before the first grandchild was born. A friend close to my age became a great-great grandfather the following year.)

As a Digital Native, our son has vague memories of landline phones and TV's no larger than a coffee-table book, but now has a smart phone (smarter than mine) and a TV that would not fit anywhere in my house; he has numerous friends who are still single and others who are married, and is married himself (plus the 2 kids); and he was in the National Guard for a few years just to make ends meet while stuck as a gig worker but now divides managing a tutoring company with being their lead tutor: I'd call him one of the best of the Millennials. He truly lives on the bridge between generations, more so than either a Gen Xer or a Gen Zer could be. I call Millennials the Bridge Generation.

Charlie Wells is a Millennial who has made his success as a writer. Looking around him at his contemporaries, and having interviewed certain ones to gather a range of context and experiences, he has issued What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. Note that there is no question mark. The title is a statement, not a question.

In this searching and panoramic book, Mr. Wells illustrates the arc of history through which his generation has passed to date, focusing on five people who agreed to be interviewed on the record. None of them experienced the straight path to adulthood and settled life that was considered "normal" by their parents and grandparents. But perhaps the term should be "ordinary" rather than "normal". The "ordinary" middle-class life path, "Finish your schooling, get a good job, marry young, have two-to-twelve children, own a home, help your kids raise their kids, stay active in your church, retire well, live long, and die contented," can be derailed at any point, and, truthfully, was honored mainly in the breach, in every generation. So why is "the breach", or many breaches, so visible for Millennials?

Quite simply, pervasive technology. I considered retracing the stories of the author's subjects, but decided instead on five characteristics. I conversed with Gemini and we boiled it down to five images that illustrate characteristics that are spread through the book, and a little of each is found in the life story of each of the five subjects. I will leave it to you to read how the author weaves them together.

Digital Natives were born in or after 1981, the year the IBM PC was released. Affordable laptops followed a few years later. In 1992 the first cell phone costing less than $1,000 was on sale, and by 1996, considered the last year a Millennial was born, some phones could be had for less than $500.

My generation and the one before went from computers that were bigger than a living room (I have a vacuum tube from a computer of that era), to "mainframes" that averaged 8-10 feet long and 5-8 feet high, and on to PC's, and now smart phones. We didn't take classes in computer science; we invented it. The classes came later. Gen X computer professionals could get degrees in computer science. Millennials and Gen Z don't need to; they can easily write apps for their phones if they're so inclined.

The 9/11 disaster and COVID-19 bookended the formative years of many Millennials. The dramatic shifts in work and work/life balance that ensued morphed into much more work-at-home and gig work. Gig Workers may not be the norm, but they are now the mainstay of technocratic middle America. 

By contrast, an increasing number of the contractors and technicians that show up at my house to fix plumbing, install appliances, and repair stuff are Millennials who usually have foregone going to college in favor of working in the trades. They typically earn more than a college graduate with a Humanities degree or even most Science degrees. Case in point among Gen X: The curator of a museum nearby, a woman of about 50 with a PhD, is married to a Lawyer, "so I can afford to be a scientist."

As I mentioned, many of our son's friends remain unmarried. Some probably don't even date. So far as I can determine, the younger a Millennial is, the less likely he or she is to be married or "looking". And those younger ones are now thirty and older. This trend is continuing among Gen Z. This "Plant Parent" is one type of contented single .

Some of the people Mr. Wells writes about got married, some didn't; some are gay, some straight, and one is bisexual; one is in an "open relationship", also called polyamory; two have children.

Many Millennials retain hobbies or pastimes of their youth. That in itself is not unusual: so do most people, and so do I. The difference is that for a great many Millennials, that pastime is online gaming. This often gets coupled with a bit of nostalgia, "retro" gaming with outdated consoles, for example.

I don't know if I fairly represent my generation. I tried some Nintendo and online games, and dropped them. I like Sudoku and non-action-oriented computer games, but I spend more time on various collecting hobbies of my youth (stamps, rocks). Our son, last I checked, is still playing an online team game (I forgot the name), and his team members now live in various cities across the TriState area, but went to high school together.

Obsessive gaming is mentioned in the book for one of the persons. So is drug addiction, for a different person. I have observed that many drug addicts who finally break free of the habit wind up working in the drug treatment and peer counseling fields. This is the case with the man in the book also.

Everyone passes through an introspective stage. Not everyone "gets over it," but usually between thirty and forty we become more secure inside our own skin. Nonetheless, many Millennials are still trying on different "skins", learning who they ultimately are or will be.

The phenomena of "the Sixties" characterized this stage for my generation. Gen Z is right in the midst of their own, while most Millennials have gotten on with life. As I recall, in one episode of All in the Family, Edith tells her daughter Gloria, "At some point, you have to do the laundry and clean house." The oldest Millennials are now forty-five, and the youngest, about thirty. So I'd say about half of them have "aged out" of the introspective phase. 

This is not really a review of the book, but of the ideas that swirl through it. Whatever age you may be, I am sure reading it will evoke thoughts of your own. If so, I hope you'll come back to this post and add a comment.