Why was Generation X like this? What was their problem?

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Addamall@reddit

Hating a cubicle job was legit in the 90s; now we are so abused as workers, even getting an entry level engineering job is considered a winning lottery ticket.

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Ok this is something I have a bit of perspective on, because I was doing IT stuff in offices as a high school job in the mid 90s. It's hard for people today to imagine how isolating office work was back then. Everybody's so connected all the time now, you've got social media and texts and calls at work. Back then there was none of that. You had a phone on your desk but outside of emergencies you couldn't use it for personal calls at all. The computer on your desk was not connected to the internet. For 8 hours a day you were totally cut off from your friends and family. Those annoying people in your office were the only social contact you got. Those annoying rules your boss comes up with, that was the fabric of your reality for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Outside of going to prison or joining the army, it's really hard for someone now to get an idea of how utterly suffocating those jobs could be.

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FormidableMistress@reddit

I remember reading news articles about "cubical culture" and how isolating it was, even though you were surrounded by people. All the communication was from bosses that wanted more done or frustrated co workers. The fluorescent lights were draining. Health problems arose from sitting at a desk all day. People in these offices just received negative stimuli day in and day out.

Hey Peter, turn it on channel 9

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Malaguy420@reddit

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We had hot desks and this one lady had a 12x4 in board with Troll dolls and a couple tchosckies glued onto it that she would put on top the desktop box under her monitor.

We usually sat in the same neighborhood if not the same desk on day shift, but nightshift with seasonal temps and moonlighting part timers was chaos of take whatever open desk. I used to sign-in inside one of the classrooms then switch over to a floor seat during my first break and have to shoot an email to say I clocked out because I moved desks every day in the fall thru early winter.

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BuffaloRedshark@reddit

thankfully we at least have an assigned desk, but it's barely wide enough for two monitors so it's cramped.

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chronofluxtoaster@reddit

Yes, that was a solution after Covid and I remember management pushing this new app where you’d log in and it would help you find an open desk. You could mostly go back to the same desk every day and even reserve it if you wanted, but at that time so many people were still working remote so it might be a day you have only 3-4 people on the floor with you, all separated by their little partitions.

It was so eerily similar to the TV series Severance that it was um-bingeable; I could only watch one episode at a time without getting stress-PTSD trauma reactions. That show demonstrated that if CEOs could legally get away with rewiring employee brains to keep their “minds focused on their labor” they’d institute it in a heartbeat, along with the temple-like worship and the “Hall of Executives” experience.

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itsmestanard@reddit

Hot desking was a thing waaaay before covid (unfortunately!)

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midwesternmayhem@reddit

I would like to introduce you to the concept of the two person cubicle. I had one, briefly, at one of my first jobs in 1999.

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irishgator2@reddit

That sounds like hell

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Guitargirl81@reddit

Came here to say this. I mean, I would KILL for my own cubicle at my office.

Open floor seating with open desks is the worst.

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worlds_okayest_skier@reddit

I had a nice setup one time that was a best of both worlds. It was a real office, but shared with 3 co workers.

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chronofluxtoaster@reddit

My previous company had the 90s era cubicle format where you had some semblance of privacy, but then they dumped a few million into a remodel where you had these little clusters of 2x6 desks - barely wide enough for your client, keyboard and writing space - all separated by a plastic partition only 18” or so high. You could see into your neighbor’s desk space, there was no soundproofing and so every call you were on (and some days you’d sit there for 6-9 hours, simply logging into Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting with no breaks) would have crosstalk from your neighbors.

Everyone called them egg cartons. I called them Borg alcoves because they were literally that. You went from being cubicle mice to just another drone plugging into the Collective and having to pencil in your restroom breaks (we didn’t have enough privacy for piss bottles, and I do think management would have supported such a sociopathic practice).

This also happened about 2 years prior to Covid, so you could understand why no one supported the return-to-office initiatives.

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autonimity@reddit

Unfortunately Shitty Fluorescent overhead lighting is still going strong in many older buildings.

And when they are finally replaced, the replacement is even more piercing shitty LED overhead lighting.

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BraeCol@reddit

My coworkers and I referred to our office space as cubehell for a reason. Just as mentioned at the top of this thread, cubehell was an isolated, boring, non-interactive environment. For people like me, that was semi-OK, but also a bit disconnecting.

In the late 2000s, the open floor plan started to emerge and most of us hamsters had been on our wheel for so long that we forgot other hamsters existed. Many protested and dreaded the open cube plan. How would I play games on my PC, sleep, etc. at my desk if everyone could easily see me now? Nevermind the reason we were doing this in the first place was as coping measures for cubehell and lack of meaningful work and/or interaction.

Once finally implemented and executed, the more open-ended floor plan was much more interesting and more interactive with co-workers. Of course for some people this was off-putting as they did not want to interact with their co-workers. For our group it worked really well and allowed for cross communication that was easy and seamless. To put it one way it was a breath of fresh air and it really did breathe life back into our work day. The only downside for me was that we were a support department and, when we were all on the phone at the same time, it could be rather noisy without the walls keeping some of the other voices in check.

Those who lived through the cubehell era completely understand the culture that's represented in movies such as Fight Club. Tyler's minimalist concepts and quips struck true with many millennials as well:

"Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man: No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off."

I think that quote really sums up the idea behind the OPs question.

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URfwend@reddit

If only Tyler knew what was coming. It's like walking into an ER saying "it sure is quiet around here". That's a quick way of manifesting a 5 car pile up on the freeway.

We got our purpose. The game settings were changed to "madman"'. We're shopping for food we can barely afford and gas at levels that were dystopian in Fight Clubs 90s. Buying even more shit we don't need, quicker than ever before and poor quality. You can make a video and upload it to YouTube and get famous and be special. A million dollars isn't even a shocking number anymore. It's now the target amount for Joe Schmos retirement portfolio to live sort of comfortable. Any optimism has been slowly bled and squeezed out of us. But then AI arrives and as something that could decimate employment opportunities while billionaires build bunkers. Something that could enable true progress and remove humans from needing to work and focus on creating meaningful things like art and music, or hobbies. But instead it's replacing peoples jobs and used in wars and the surveillance state.

How naive you were Tyler...

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Snoo14546@reddit

I was in a cubical

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desertrose0@reddit

I mean, cubicles still exist.

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Zealousideal_Golf101@reddit

Yeah, but with the open floor plan model. Back then, they had a lot of them closed off.

It wasn't until tech got big and everyone was trying to model the Google culture that you got the short walled cubes without doors.

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Cooper_Sharpy@reddit

Office Space really nailed the cubicle nightmare but they could have never predicted that it could possibly get much worse.

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elmoosh@reddit

100%. And at my office, I somehow end up being the recipient of a shit ton of chit-chat in spite of me wearing big headphones and avoiding all eye contact. Almost NOBODY seems to understand the basics of office etiquette, much less common courtesy. I don’t know if they ever did, but we’re old enough by now to know it’s worse than it used to be, by far.

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CariniFluff@reddit

Man you wouldn't believe it but at my first job out of college, after the 9 month training program at the HQ, I went to my home city office and had my own office with like a 400lb solid hardwood door. I had windows to look outside, my shared assistant was 10ft from my office door. It was amazing even if my local boss sucked.

After I left there I knew I wouldn't get another office but I did lunch out and get this corner cube where one side was a wall, being me was filing cabinets no one used and the door to the IT server room. My co-workers sat across and next to me but with solid 5' cube walls, no glass or plexiglass tops.

And then it was all down hill from there... They tore all of that out and I had a shared 2x3 setup and my back was to an open hallway so every person walking down the wall could see my screens and I'd constantly get interrupted. Next place (same company, different office), we had the same 2x3 setup but with no dividing walls at all. At least the previous one had like 1.5ftv solid wall and another 1ft frosted glass.

And is been variations of this shit ever since. The best part is that the executives were convinced to switch to this in order to "encourage teamwork" and "cross-functional opportunities". Except in my line of work, everyone works on their own account from start to finish. Occasionally we'll need to speak to the legal team or someone from a different product line for a quick referral, but I would never be working with my cubicle neighbors/teammate on a deal, again I handle it from start to finish.

The open Office setup I can see being useful if like 10 people are all working on the same client/account. Consulting firms would be a great beneficiary of this setup. Or perhaps some computer coding or graphic design for a client's marketing campaign. But it just makes no sense on my industry; in fact anyone interrupting me breaks my concentration and can take me a couple minutes to get back to where I was. And yet somehow the people that make 200x my salary don't understand the absolutely fundamental importance of focus and concentration when you're crunching numbers and looking for patterns in dense data.

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TotallyNotRobotEvil@reddit

Yeah, I’m one of those people who went straight into office life. I was jealous of you lol, like by a lot. Pretty miserable getting up at 5:30am to get to work by 7:40am, and then sometimes work until 11pm (or later!). Most of my 20s and early 30s were spent grinding through multiple once in a life time recessions (dot com crash, Great Recession), and it does suck that I never just got to be a normal 20 something, just go out to clubs, festivals or whatever.

Only recently have I gotten to a level that my work life balance is pretty good. Retirement is still a bit ways off due to me living in a high COL area. But otherwise life is pretty good. Would I do it all over again? Man I am not sure I would.

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DickWhittingtonsCat@reddit

I think it rather depends on the office and your position. You must have lived in a suburb back when “temp” summer jobs paid 10-15 an hour in late 1990s and aughts?

There were a lot of people my age at some of those gigs. Especially the ubiquitous projects to image and digitize paper files for pensions and shit.

But yes, if it was a more fulltime and permanent gig in place of college with older coworkers, your only recourse would be to smoke tons of cigarettes if you wanted to make friends.

Straight talk, I haven’t smoked in over a decade, but dive bars and social events in public have basically been just death marches of tedium for me since the escape valve of going outside to rip butts in the alley was taken away.

Even when you could smoke in bars, there was nothing better than smoking in the gutter and talking shit with strange women. The true pants shitting drunks usually didn’t make it that far.

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SimpleVegetable5715@reddit

There was likely a tv in the break room that played the news if something important was happening.

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Then, all of a sudden, the second plane comes into the camera view and slams into the second tower.

I was 22 years old at the time and I think it's the first time I actually felt legitimate "panic".

I didn't live in New York but Im about 40 minutes from DC.

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ooomellieooo@reddit

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footsnax@reddit

We spend so much time bitching about always being online we forget what it was like before you could contact basically anyone at any time and anywhere…

You get off work at McMinimumwage and want to hang out with your friend Frank that lives nearby, nobody's home so you just go home. Try to call an hour later and leave a message with his mom, but his mom has a thing to go to and they don't cross paths. Go out for a bike ride and bump into Steve and he said he just saw Frank at the Pizza Hut but he was about to leave. Go noodling over by the PH since you're out already and find him on his way home but then the streetlights come on so you both have to go home and he crashes his bike over a pothole so you spend the next half hour looking for someone that's home so you can call Frank's parents to come pick him up at the corner of Nowhere and Nothing but nobody's home so you just sit with him to the curb until he thinks he stopped bleeding enough to get back on the road.

This isn't even a uniquely specific story, names and places fake obviously but this kinda shit happened more than a once and I didn't even blink about it in the moment. I think I've forgotten more examples than I could recall, those kinda nights were any given Tuesday at their worst.

There's no explaining how natural this experience was to anyone that owned a cell phone before college. This was the way. Sleeping in your bed at night was a plan, not a goal, not a requirement.

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ooomellieooo@reddit

We spent all day in the woods/creek or literally on the other side of town. You kinda just knew where to find your friends, starting with knocking on the nearest one's door and following the trail lol. Maybe there was a payphone somewhere on a main road where you could fake collect call your mother. Or maybe you just got home when you got home. As long as the school wasn't on the phone and the cops weren't at the door, your parents were like...ok, this is fine.

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ElectricVibrance@reddit

Who screws around on Reddit during their breaks?

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xt0rt@reddit

Right!? That's clearly and "on the clock" activity lol

It truly made me miss working in retail, which I thought I hated.

I did that for like 2 months, and it was awful.

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dweezilMcCheezil@reddit

8hrs? I wish

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CokeBottleSpeakerPen@reddit

This comes off like trying to reason with people why you're an alcoholic. I worked in an office until a few years ago, and even with social media, this was my reality. It's not that hard to put up with. Poor Gen X. 😞

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hearts_of_glass@reddit

I always think about Neo sitting at his desk in his gray environment and finally having some sort of connection to the broader world via the Internet making it so hard to sit there. I was exactly where he was in the year 2000. The internet and communication was so new and interesting and chaotic. I just wanted out of that grey cubicle and away from the boss who would visit to see how everything was going constantly.

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No_Mud_5999@reddit

I had a job in 1994 that paid $20 an hour, which for me was amazing. I was contracted to operate a microfiche camera in the Library of Congress, transferring depression era photos of buildings to microfiche. The Library as cool, a lot of neat stuff to see, but I had no coworkers, just me and the microfiche camera. It was... a bit dull is an understatement.

I didn't last more than a summer.

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Candid-Inspection-97@reddit

Exactly how I felt about school (plus the exhaustive cramming of information with very little time to process before testing and moving on to the next subject - just a blanket of anxiety to perform well or your future was fucked)

A call center job where everyone hates you on the phone, staff that are either the boss or schmoozing the boss and one wrong step gets you shittier hours. I fantasized often about jumping out the window or turning my car into oncoming traffic.

An office job was document prepping, so flipping through pages to remove staples, unbend corners, tape tears, at a desk in a shared office but everyone there is doing another task, no chatting, MAYBE a radio playing and the rhythmic sound of the machines.

When all your friends are on a different schedule so you fall out of contact because there was no "do not disturb" function, you could wake them up after a 12 hour shift or they could be waking you up, so you try to be considerate and then 5 years have gone by and you havent spoken to them.

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Merusk@reddit

bankman99@reddit

Idk I think there was more leeway - now every action is tracked. They know what you’re doing, where you are, etc.

I used to smoke weed on the job all the time, and it was almost expected to sneak off as needed. Because who would ever know?

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zepploon@reddit

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BadMantaRay@reddit

Good reply!

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punktualPorcupine@reddit

Yep. Take away peoples phones, turn off the internet and have them just sit for 8hrs, in complete isolation.

Most can’t go 10 min without checking their phone and would lose their minds after 1-2hrs let alone do that for years.

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OkArmy7059@reddit

I remember having downtime, but being so bored out of my skull that after a few minutes I'd ask a supervisor what more I could. Definitely not a world I'm eager to return to!

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mcvmccarty@reddit

Yep. I had a bit of flex with my job so I would come in at night and do all my stuff. I got sick of having to laugh at jokes from the morons I worked with who pissed away the first 3 hours of the day “socializing” with everyone, probably because they weren’t respected at home. My boss almost fired me because I was always coming in at noon or later until he realized I was more productive than everyone else because I gave myself a little bit of life in the morning outside of work. The internet was just starting up but not at all what it is now. The job felt like a yoke. Pay also wasn’t that great so…

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nefarious_angel_666@reddit

I tried to work in an office once. Didn't stay long

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And you reach this point of “middle management” and get stuck there because the boomers above you have made their job their entire personality so they won’t retire. Despite being the last generation with pension plans, or retirement savings accounts providing very high returns. Propped up by an insane housing market they could easily cash in on to fund their retirement.

/rant

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notneverman@reddit

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testmonkeyalpha@reddit

This is just an example of other generations not knowing anything about Gen X.

People tend to forget Gen X started working during the recession of the early 90s because it was followed by the second biggest economic boom in history. All people remember is the economic boom. But the bleak onset of Gen X careers made the entire generation jaded about jobs and careers.

On top of that, when Gen X started working, the fluff stories on the news were about how Gen X would be the first generation in American history that's **less** successful than the previous one. And they just kept bringing that up for several years. I remember reading an article about it in Newsweek when I was in high school. Yeah, a real shocker that an entire generation would be jaded when the older ones keep saying you'll be a failure before you even get a chance to try.

Meanwhile millennials did the exact same thing. Recession during their first couple of years followed by an even bigger economic boom. But all the memes focus on the first couple of rough years. They get to be jaded about the much better working conditions they have compared to Gen X (whose jadedness directly led to the improved working conditions Millennials benefit from)

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Coomstress@reddit

I entered corporate America in 2007. It was long-hours, cutthroat, top-down brutal management, and there were threats of layoffs just like today. Those weren’t “easy” or necessarily stable jobs.

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Loyal-Opposition-USA@reddit

His job was pretty evil.

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SciFi_Wasabi999@reddit

It's sad to me that what one generation found miserable (being a cog in a dehumanizing corporate machine) the current generation WISHES WAS AN OPTION. It's like being in a reality where you get stabbed in the gut and missing the days you could opt for a punch in the face instead. That doesn't mean either generation is wrong, it means things just continue to get worse.

The premise tries to pit Gen X against Gen Z/Alpha, when in reality it's the system that is completely fucked up.

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adammonroemusic@reddit

Fight Club is still relevant; we are still living in a dystopian-corporate-consumerist hellscape where a lot of people lack a real community, human connections, or meaningful relationships beyond casual work acquaintances.

The only thing that's really changed is we've added smartphones and the insanity of social media.

The cherry on top, really.

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AffectionateFig5864@reddit

“Sorry to Bother You” is the updated version.

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chazysciota@reddit

we are still living in a dystopian-corporate-consumerist hellscape where a lot of people lack a real community, human connections, or meaningful relationships beyond casual work acquaintances.

Away_Supermarket_995@reddit

As someone in the original comments said - Specifically his job was figuring out whether it would cost more money to deal with lawsuits or issue a recall if the parts in their cars broke and maimed or killed people. His whole job was to dehumanize himself and others.

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spc67u@reddit

Yes exactly 🙌 I just commented too that this will break a person. I’ve had jobs where I’m supposed to dehumanize the client and possibly put them in medical danger. Not cool. Had to quit.

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lost_horizons@reddit

Would love to hear the story on this. Change names and places as necessary to tell it.

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ooomellieooo@reddit

I had a job like this, deciding claims. I lasted a week before my humanity won out and I left.

*were x3

"Where" has to do with location
"Were" has to do with the past

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A_Thorny_Petal@reddit

yeah I know but I have neurological damage so you get what you get

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amilo111@reddit

Wow. Tens of millions of high executive positions. That’s amazing.

We're shit on from both sides & always will be.

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SatansFriendlyCat@reddit

The condemnation of Gen X is already growing online, as the Boomers diminish in number and Gen Z and onwards are coming into their own. It's just a straight copy-and-paste of the boomer condemnation, which takes no account of the different situation.

(Also, for helpful communication purposes: quite by chance, the same number.)

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Sumeriandawn@reddit

Over half of Fortune 500 CEOs are GenX

The average age of an incoming CEO is 54

In 2018 , GenX accounted for 51% of leadership roles globally

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brittanytobiason@reddit

He was probably hallucinating that, too.

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sdougshaw@reddit

We were latchkey kids raised by boomer parents, most of us had a free rein to roam free most of our youth...9-5 jobs felt like a cafe compared to our youth. Most generations after us had much more structured childhoods, so the 9-5 was not as shocking...

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AgPatriotAg@reddit

Many Late Genx/Xennials were sort of a different generation. It was actually a bit harder to find a good job or find an apartment with a job at a young age. I've heard many boomers basically could work on the Sears sales floor and afford apartments and smaller homes.

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1block@reddit

I don't really think we know that experience. Job market was better, I suppose. Getting drafted to go die in a jungle kinda would blow more than having a shitty job I bet. Plus a lot of those stable jobs were manufacturing, which most people think they're too good for today.

This crap reminds me of Gen Z telling me how lucky I was in the 2000s when I personally know I was making $400/week and living in a shitty duplex in a meat packing town with trains going through my back yard in the middle of the night.

Plus this pining for yesteryears only is better if you're a white, straight man. Anyone else isn't getting access to that superduper job market like they think they would.

Everyone cherry picks situations from the last that are only better if you ignore the shit from those years. Hell, even housing. You could afford houses in the 80s, but guess what? Homeownership rate was lower, because you couldn't even get a damned loan.

Let's just work on the shit that's wrong today without acting like everyone else had glorious lives of comfort and luxury.

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ElCaminoLady@reddit

Per the difficulty of getting a house loan back then (late 70’s-early 80’s).. why I grew up in the middle of nowhere 50 miles outside of the city. (Folks couldn’t get a loan for a house anywhere near civilization) A friend of my dad’s had to resort to buying a crappy piece of ground with an old cemetery on it, and build a house on his own!

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SearchCapital7719@reddit

If Gen Z was still living in the area I was living in when I got my first apartment in the 2000's, they could easily afford the same shitty apartment today. The problem is, no one wants to move back to those cities, then more employers move away/go out of business, then more people move away to find better work.

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mottledmussel@reddit

Many boomers also came home from vietnam to the collapsing economy of the 1970s. The good jobs at steel mills, auto plants, mines, and factories that their parents promised and pressured them into were disappearing for good. The world they grew up with was disappearing. The factories and houses in their hometowns were being boarded up. It's why Born in the USA resonates so much with boomers and why they pushed their kids so hard towards college.

This crap reminds me of Gen Z telling me how lucky I was in the 2000s when I personally know I was making $400/week and living in a shitty duplex in a meat packing town with trains going through my back yard in the middle of the night.

My mom worked in tech from the late 80s until she retired last year. She was floored at how accurate Office Space was to her experience. While she is a young boomer she related to the frustration of being told the same thing over and over by multiple bosses, lay offs, and annoying corporate culture

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SilverAsparagus2985@reddit

Reality Bites is the one I struggle to relate to. She had a job working in her field, even if it was at the bottom and stressful. When you figure up what she was making in today's dollars it's more than most people make coming out of college now (who aren't engineers or in tech).

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