Too Young for Woodstock, Too Old for Gen X

On being born late enough to miss the boom, and early enough to be blamed for it.

A few years ago, at a family gathering, I was dismissed from a conversation with two words: “OK Boomer.” The group laughed. I politely excused myself.

What had happened was this. A group of young people – friends of my children, late twenties to early thirties – were talking about housing, as young people in Australia tend to do. Someone mentioned, not as an accusation but as a fact, that people my age had had it easy. I said, calmly, that I wasn’t sure that was quite right.

Yes, houses were cheaper when we were buying. Yes. But so were incomes. The ratio of house prices to average earnings has worsened considerably, and I was not pretending otherwise. What I pushed back on was the interest-rate amnesia. The young people in that conversation were describing 5% rates as an unbearable burden. We had bought our first home when rates peaked at 17%. We had lived through stagflation, through the 1987 stock market crash, through the recession of the early 1990s. I was not claiming we had it worse – I want to be clear about that, because that is not the argument I am making. I was simply declining to accept that we had it easy.

“OK Boomer.” Two words. Conversation over.

Here is the thing. I was born in 1958. By the demographic definition, that makes me a baby boomer. And yet I have never, in my adult life, felt like one – because the cultural image of the baby boomer has almost nothing to do with my experience, and I have spent years being unable to explain exactly why.

The baby boomer, as the term exists in popular understanding, is a specific cultural figure. Woodstock. The Vietnam protests. Free love, the counterculture, the generation that defined itself against its parents by tearing down the conservative postwar order. The Rolling Stones. The Pill. The long weekend of social revolution that reshaped Western culture in the 1960s.

I was in Grade 5 in 1969. My family did not yet own a television. And had we owned one, we would not have been watching Woodstock.

There is a name for people like me, though it took me until recently to find it: Generation Jones. Jonathan Pontell coined the term in 1999 for those born roughly between 1954 and 1965 – too young for the counterculture, too old for Gen X, and somehow blamed for a party many of us never attended.

The economic experience of Generation Jones in Australia is also distinct from the older Boomers – and this is where the “you had it easy” claim falls apart on its own terms.

The older Boomers entered the workforce in the 1960s during the long postwar expansion. Full employment. Rising real wages. Cheap housing relative to income. They built wealth during the boom because they were there for the boom.

Generation Jones entered the workforce in the late 1970s and early 1980s – into stagflation, into the oil shocks, into the end of the postwar settlement. By the time we were trying to buy homes and build careers, the conditions that had allowed our older brothers and sisters to do so with relative ease had deteriorated. And then came the 1987 crash, and then the 1990 recession, and then the Hawke/Keating government’s removal of free tertiary education – so that our children paid, through HECS, for the university places that had been free for the people born a decade before us.

The list is longer than this. The pension age has been raised repeatedly during our working lives, so the retirement we were planning for has moved. The superannuation system was introduced late enough that our contributions have had less time to compound than those of younger workers who will spend their entire careers contributing to it. None of these things make us victims. But they are not “easy.”

What I feel closer to, in lived experience, is Gen X – and the reason is one word: self-sufficiency. Gen X is often described as the “latchkey generation”: children who came home to empty houses, figured things out on their own, navigated the world without a reliable guide. My experience was not identical to that, but it rhymes. In a Greek migrant household, my parents knew how to work and how to build a community. What they did not know was how Australian systems operated. Need to apply for university: figure it out. Open a bank account: figure it out. Apply for a housing loan: figure it out. The infrastructure of Australian life was, for us, a foreign language – and we had to translate it for ourselves. The hardiness, the self-reliance, the mild suspicion of institutions that characterises Gen X is a much closer match to how I actually grew up than the story of privileged rebellion that attaches to the baby boomer label.

I am not writing this to relitigate a conversation at a family party. The young people there were not wrong that housing is harder now – they are right, and I told them so. What I am pushing back on is the laziness of the label. “Baby boomer” has come to mean something specific in our cultural vocabulary – a figure of relative ease and cultural capital who got in early and pulled the ladder up. That person exists. I am not that person.

My generation doesn’t have a common name in Australia. Generation Jones has not made it into the mainstream here the way it has in the United States. But the experience it describes – of being born just late enough to miss the good parts and just early enough to be blamed for them – is recognisable to anyone who lived it.

Two words don’t cover it. They never did.

A necessary clarification: I am not suggesting that my generation had it harder than young people do now. Quite the opposite.

Housing costs alone make the comparison stark. In 1980, I bought my first house for $63,000 while earning $13,000 a year as a new Telecom computer programmer: about 4.85 times my gross salary. That same job now pays roughly $80,000, while that house – one I rather wish I had kept – is worth about $2.8 million: 35 times that salary.

Telling young people to work harder, or to forgo avocado on toast, is laughable. Their obstacles are real and, in important ways, much greater than ours were. My point is simply that the fact that our circumstances were less difficult did not make them easy.