What's the Word?
Quantum entanglement: is the phenomenon of a group of particles being generated, interacting, or sharing spatial proximity in such a way that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance. (Oxford Languages)
Time Travel: (verb) travel through time into the past or the future. (Oxford Languages)
Quantum: a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents.
The Fun Facts:
- 95% of the 42-year-old to 57-year-old age demographic uses at least one social media platform.
- More than 50% of all adults between the ages of 42 and 57 engage with videos from brands on social media.
- 54% of Generation X consumers feel overlooked by brands and marketers.
- 93% of global consumers expect more of the brands they use to support local, social and environmental issues.
- The term “Generation X” was popularized by Canadian author Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.
Source: Google Digital Marketing
Generational Aptitude and Attitude
Generation X has a problem. Gen X’s problem is not Millennials or Baby Boomers. Generation X is now known as the “forgotten generation” and as a Gen X’er, I feel it's time to speak up.
Generation X has been “forgotten” because we are considered the smaller “Baby Bust” generation born after the larger Baby Boomers and before the next and larger Millennial generation.
We’ve been called many things from Xennials, Generation Jones, to the Star Wars Generation and now we are more colloquially known as the “Forgotten Generation”. Blah!
Millennials Own the World
Staying with the Millennials. The Millennial Generation aged 29 to 44, has the world in their hands. They are the first generation to have the Internet since birth and will have it their entire adult lives.
The Millennials were preceded by Generation X, aged 45 to 60. Gen X is the first generation to grow up with personal computers and the internet. Gen X has had the internet since their prime young adulthood and yes, surfing the pre-internet on an IBM, CBS, and Sears Roebuck and Company joint venture subscription service called the Prodigy Online Service was a thing in the late 1980s and early 1990s!
Amongst my three email addresses, I still have a “Hotmail” address. I get laughed at and LOL all the time concerning that email address, but I am fiercely proud of it, riding that moniker like a 1968 classic Dodge Charger and I wear it like a badge of my historical time-traveling existence. It proves I was “there” when email came into being. Hotmail is like real estate: they aren’t making any more Hotmail addresses!
God is not making any more Gen X’ers either. They are now officially a rare breed.
Gen X’ers could not feel more overlooked as they are now what is popularly considered the "forgotten generation”. Wedged between the largest generation of our time, the Baby Boomers aged 61 to 79 and their echo boomlet of Millennial children, Generation X is overshadowed.
Rarely a day goes by that I don’t see a news article trumpeting about the Millennials as the children of Boomers with no mention of Gen X. Let’s not forget, some of Generation X had Boomer parents too!
This is a Case for the Forgotten Generation to be Remembered
So this is a case for curing the amnesia of the “Forgotten Generation” from someone in that generation. I have always loved repurposing scientific principles in everyday life. This is the case why “generational entanglement” is so important due to its relationship to interdependency or borrowing from physics: “Quantum Entanglement”. In Physics, Quantum Entanglement is used to simulate time travel.
Stay With Me, It Gets Better
Firstly, everyone in Generation X IS a time traveler. You read it right. We transcend time. My best friend since kindergarten, Gene, is the person who enlightened me to this in a recent phone conversation about the Gen X “forgotten” dilemma.
“We know how to time travel”, my friend Gene asserted over the phone. Responding to my incredulous “Really?” Gene said, “We are all time travelers because we’ve witnessed so much through history”.
Gene went on to describe how we as Gen X’ers witnessed so much during our time and unlike other generations a lot of it has stuck and in many cases, we accelerated it. From the Civil Rights Movement to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise (and fall) of MTV.
Skim Over this Part if You Are the Impatient Type
Of course, Gen X was also nicknamed the “MTV Generation” and that was after being called the “Latch Key Generation” because typically Gen X’ers came from Silent Generation/Boomer households where both parents worked and we came home after school to an empty house accessible by latch key to watch “Mr. Ed The Talking Horse” and “The Little Rascals” reruns. My mother was a stay-at-home mom so I was excluded from the latchkey statistic, but my friend Gene proudly wore his home key around his neck to school when we were in second grade. One time I walked home with him after school and witnessed what it was like to be a “Latch Key Kid”. I thought he was the luckiest kid alive to come home and not have his mother harass him to pick up his clothes or clean his room. He and I sat on the sofa and ate Nutter Butter cookies and watched our favorite superhero in “Spidey Super Stories” on the Electric Company. This was Generation X bliss!
The Wedgie Generation Gets Real
While we are a wedgie generation (one more moniker) crammed between two larger generations, further investigation illuminates the importance of a generation that witnessed some of the greatest moments in world history from the Apollo Moon landings (I still have memories of watching rocket launches with my Dad) to the invention of the internet and now AI’s moment.
Sure previous generations can make similar claims, but Generation X is the only generation that not only witnessed the birth of the personal computer, we were in our prime learning years when it happened. I recall my Silent Generation Dad saying, “That’s the only appliance in the house I don’t know how to use”. He said these words on the day we brought home our first personal computer, a $250 Commodore 64 with 64 KB of memory. At that time, 64 KB was considered a massive amount of memory, especially at that price. Today we send single emails and writing utensils with more memory than a Commodore 64!
In addition to the recent developments in AI, Generation X is still “young” enough to learn and adapt to new technology, whereas many Boomers, like the PC in the nineteen eighties, have either written AI off or think it is a fad.
I have fond memories of working in the early nineties and listening to my Silent Gen/Boomer co-workers complain about having to turn in their pen and paper notepads for a laptop computer. Honestly, I thought it was crazy to not want a laptop computer, something I could become ten times more productive with during the day and play video games on at night!
What makes Generation X unique is our superpower: time travel. Not only are we young enough to absorb relatively new innovations like AI and Blockchain, we also have on average over forty years of experience with technology from video games to cordless and mobile phones.
We Had Front Row Seats to the Most Massive Changes In History
What sets us apart as ardent time travelers is we had the “VIP” front-row seats to witness all the massive change from the industrial age to the information age. The birth of the PC happened during our formative teenage years and many of us had access to PCs in high school and college. I taught myself the BASIC computer language in ninth grade because my high school did not allow me to take my first computer class until my sophomore year. I was too impatient to wait another year when I knew technology was evolving so fast. I was sharpening my time-traveling skills early!
Contrast Generation X learning on PCs in high school to today when kids still either use PCs in school and college or a derivative of the PC in iPads, laptops, or tablets.
Again time travel was on Generation X’s side when Apple Computer and a Boomer named Steve Jobs led the development of the iPad tablet and iPod in the early 2000s. Gen X’ers were in their prime working years and adapted to the technology fast because our time-traveling legacy from playing Pong to the Palm Pilot had prepared us for the future. We weren’t quite digitally native, but for many of us, it was second nature.
While every generation can attest to having experienced change and the arrival of new tech and ideas, what is different about Gen X is most of the innovation that occurred during our formative years is still around from PCs (again) to digital technology. The difference is we’ve seen it evolve to its current state via an acceleration of change and innovation that the world has not yet seen. We saw firsthand the analog 8-track and VHS evolve into Laser Discs, CDs, and Blu-Ray DVDs. Our superpower is our ability to thread a needle through that history and appreciate that there was also something called the cassette tape that happened between the 8-track and CDs.
Contrast that to my father telling me when he took a FORTRAN computer class in college he learned on a room-sized mainframe computer that he fed instructions via punched cards.
Skim This Paragraph If You Hate Music
Generation X also witnessed some of the greatest seminal moments in modern music history from the rise of Boomers: Elvis, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Prince to the transition to new innovators Gen X’ers Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and J. Dilla. We heard our parents play music by Chicago, The Beatles, and The Ohio Players. We first heard Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” while playing tag at the family picnic. We witnessed the first moon launch evolve into the “man on the moon” on MTV and we saw the Space Shuttle Challenger explode, the Twin Towers collapse, and the election of our first Black U.S. President.
The Impact of Four Generations In the Workplace
Currently, four generations are in the workplace: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z.
Now as Gen X enters their retirement years as the “Forgotten Generation”, they are having to tap into their time-traveling powers to face the disintegration of the quantum entanglement illusion we call retirement and in some cases the collapse of the “American Dream”. The extinction of the pension took the carrot away that many were working towards in the realm of a “golden years retirement” and now many have spent a lot of years of their life working towards something they now know they did not want.
For example, I was lucky enough to work for a company where due to my start date I was “grandfathered” into their pension program just before it was sent to the extinction dustbins for all new hires coming in thereafter. So, yes a few of us Gen X’ers have a pension too. Time travel is dope!
So now we have a generation of time travelers who are not waiting until 70 to retire and in many cases have not had a choice to retire at a ripe age as so many of the Boomers have done, although many Boomers have resisted and sluggishly eased their way into retirement.
Some Gen X’ers have been fortunate to “retire” as early as 56 and start new lives doing exactly what they wanted every day whether it is riding their bike, writing a blog, or building a new business. So now we are not doing what one would call “work” or “retirement”, but it is more like fulfillment. Ah, yes, and some of us have used time travel to reach our fulfillment years.
Generation X will re-write the book on “retirement” just as we’ve done on so many other things from music to fashion. Gen X is taking up a new challenge in making a living doing something they love and in many cases now working for themselves and creating more startups and innovation.
Retirement: The New Definition
These observations entitle a loosening of the definition of Quantum Entanglement that is more applicable to those of us who are generational “time” travelers :
Quantum Generational Entanglement: is the phenomenon of a group of people being born, interacting, or sharing generational proximity in such a way that the quantum state or the discrete energy of each person of that generation cannot be described independently of the state of the other adjacent generations, including when the people of that generation and adjacent generations are separated by many years.
All Generations are Time Travelers
Similar to the Quantum Generation of modern-day physics, Quantum Generational Entanglement is bigger than time travel because it is in the moment. Generation X is better for not being “forgotten” because we have the power to remember such a long complex and varied history. But Gen X is not alone as all generations are similar and interdependent. All generations time travel.
Generational Interdependence helps answer the “why” of “generational entanglement”. Generational Entanglement is important because it is the glue that holds all generations together in interdependency. We are all connected and generations should not be pitted against one another and ultimately no generation should ever be “forgotten”.
The moral to this story is we all need each other’s energy regardless of generation and while I like to think Gen X is pretty dope when it comes to time travel, we honestly are all time travelers regardless of generation. Whether it's Millennials clawing their way to their next promotion or Boomers resisting the call of retirement once more and of course Gen X operating somewhere in between “worlds” and time traveling their way to fulfillment. We all have a place in this world and there is no “place” in denying that to others. We can all be fulfilled if we work together and open our minds to a little empathy and try. Find your place and be fulfilled!
As a final footnote:
Aside from being a dope time traveler, my friend Gene is the dopest Graphic Designer. Check him out here: https://www.yoojdesign.com/
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