Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's been a few months since the last BuzzFeed listicle mis-categorizing everyone over 40 as "Boomers". It's time for another! Earlier this week I read "If You've Done At Least 15 Of These 35 Things, You're 1000% A Boomer"... which I'll note was titled "...You're 1000% Over 65" (emphasis mine) at the time  I first read it. Like the last of these articles I read it shows that Gen Z— the age group that authors who write these fluffy click-bait articles belong to— thinks that anyone who remembers things that were common up through the 1980s must be a Boomer / senior citizen.

Ahem, we kids who were growing up and doing things in the 1980s are called Gen X. And we're in our 40s/50s. And even many older Millennials remember many of the things on this recent list.

BTW, my score on this list was 20/35. And I'm many years short of being a Boomer. Here are just Five Things from the list of supposed "Boomer" items that virtually all Gen Xers, and most older Millennials, would be familiar with:

1. Have you ever manually cranked a car window up or down?

Manual-crank car windows were common up through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The first car I bought, a new 1991 vehicle, had manual crank windows. Yes, power windows were common by then, too, but in that era economy cars still had manual windows. I recall once getting a rental car in the mid 2000s that still had manual windows. I'll bet most people who are 35+, not just 65+, have cranked a manual window at some point.

3. Have you ever watched television on a TV that had no remote control and just dials?

I recall my parents first got a TV with wireless remote control in about 1985. Prior to that changing the channel— or even adjusting the volume— required walking up to the device and turning a knob. Or pressing a button. Yes, there was a middle ground between turning big, chunky, old-fashioned knobs and modern remote controls. TVs had modern push-button controls on the device for years before buttons on wireless remotes became common.

I used a non-remote TV again in 1992-1993 in college. It was an older TV set one of my housemates got from his parents. It had those chunky, old-fashioned knobs on it... but we rarely used them, because with only one, weak, weeny TV station available via antenna, we left the TV tuned to channel 3 for input from the VCR. Ah, tuning to channel 3 for VCRs and video games. that's another 1980s-ism... that virtually all Gen Xers and older Millennials would remember.

16. Have you ever looked up a phone number in the phone book?

Younger people these days may have trouble imagining a world before everything was online, but it wasn't that long ago. Amazon didn't even open until 1995, and back then it was just a bookstore. It wasn't until the early 2000s that most traditional businesses began to have even a minimal web presence, one where you could at least find their address and store hours. Thus, needing to use a phone book to find phone numbers to call for information— if it wasn't already shown in a yellow pages ad— was a regular thing up through the early 00s.

BTW, I say this as a digital native living in Silicon Valley. Less technical people and those living in less connected areas would've used phone books on the regular for a few more years.

19./20. Have you ever eaten at McDonald's when the food still came in Styrofoam packaging / when smoking was still allowed?

This one's a two-fer. I've grouped these two together because they're both about McDonald's and because they're not subject to any one person's memory. Questions like "When did [Company X] start/stop [doing Y]?" can be answered via simple search. Y'know, by using the web, that thing that people mistakenly believe kids these days excel at because they're online 24/7 while Boomers (and "Boomers") squint their eyes at and act befuddled and call their kids for help?

McDonald's went big with styrofoam containers for sandwiches in the 1980s. They started phasing it out in 1990 due to popular campaigns against non-biodegradable waste. I mention both the stop and start dates here because actual Boomers would remember a time long before styrofoam containers became common. And really it was just a period of <10 years. But yes, we Gen Xers remember that era well, because it's when we were growing up and treasuring those visits to McDonald's with our parents.

As far as smoking in McDonald's, smoking in all restaurants was common up through the 1990s and even into the 21st century. McDonald's banned smoking in restaurants as a corporate policy in 1994 (New York Times article, 1994!) but that only affected company-owned stores. Most stores were franchised. Smoking in restaurants was banned by law in various jurisdictions over the next fifteen years. California banned smoking in restaurants (but not bars) in 1995. New York banned smoking in restaurants in 2003. It wasn't until 2010 that many other states banned smoking in restaurants. Example source: List of smoking bans in the United States (Wikipedia article).

14. Have you ever balanced a checkbook?
Yes, two days ago.

Recently it's become a hot topic on social media whether buying a "$7 coffee" daily/most days of the week is a reasonable treat or a financial failing. This is kind of a repeat of canards like "avocado toast" and "$5 lattes" from past years. Of course now it's a $7 coffee instead of a $5 latte because of inflation.

The basic canard is that young people— and it's almost almost a tongue clucking criticism of younger adults— are destroying their financial futures by wasting their money on frivolous treats such as coffee, lattes, avocado toast, or whatever modern treat old fogies don't understand, when instead they could, and should, be saving that money toward important things like a down payment on buying a house, or retirement.

Although the social media shaming is a modern phenomenon, the underlying question of, "How much should one sacrifice today to save for tomorrow?" is not new. It's a question I asked myself long ago when I was starting out as an adult, years before there was social media and things like maligning avocado toast became memes.

Back then a common way to frame the question was around what to eat for lunch. Do you bring a bag lunch of a cheap sandwich, or do you go out to eat for lunch? A PB&J sandwich was the proxy for wisely saving for later; eating lunch out, even fast food, was the proxy for wastefully spending money today.

I made my own decision long ago that both halves of the question were simultaneously right and wrong. Yes, saving money for the future is right. But enjoying the present is right, too. And reducing the two to a dilemma— where only one is possible— is wrong. I would save some of my money to have nice things in the future while not forcing myself to live an overly austere life in the present. I would eat fast food lunches instead of brown-bagging PB&J sandwiches, because that brought me satisfaction in the present, and I would save for my own future. It was like I would have my cake and eat it, too.

So far it's worked for me.

Hard Seltzer is a new category of alcoholic drink that has emerged over the past several years. It's often associated with Millennials, the age group that have popularized it & to whom it is generally marketed. If you've heard Millennials talking about drink brands like White Claw, Topo Chico, and Truly— those are hard seltzers.

By the way, if you still think "Millennials" is a pejorative for "kids", you need to catch up with the times, Boomer. Millennials are people born between 1981 and 1996. Even youngest Millennials have been old enough to buy drinks legally for 5+ years now, let along the older Millennials who are now in their 40s. That's why the market has been shifting around their preferences for several years.

While I enjoy many kinds of alcohol drinks I've resisted trying hard seltzers. For me it's two things. One, hard seltzers tout lots of strong fruit and/or sour flavors. Those aren't my taste in drinks. Two, I am skeptical of "alternative" malt beverages from awful products that alcohol companies foisted on the public in my formative years— crummy wine coolers and the total commercial flop named Zima. Yes, I tried Zima. Once. In the early '90s. I've been reluctant to try anything like it ever since.

Just recently, though, I gave in and tried a hard seltzer. It was High Noon Pineapple Vodka & Soda.

Why'd I do that? Well, I wanted to use one of my coupons for a free drink on my Southwest flight yesterday. A couple years ago they had a really good beer, Fat Tire, but they discontinued it. They even discontinued the one decent beer they used to carry, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy. After those my usual pick became Gin and Tonic, but now Southwest has discontinued even gin! So I decided to give this pineapple-vodka drink a try.

How did it taste? It tastes like a pineapple soda. It's like 1 part pineapple juice mixed with, say, 2 parts club soda or tonic water. I could imagine this being sold in non-alcoholic form as a refreshing fruit soda. But it's got 4.5% alcohol. Except the vodka it's spiked with is flavorless and almost impossible to detect. Basically the drink is alco-pop.

Would I drink it again? Not really. I mean, I might buy it aboard Southwest again— but that's mostly because their other choices are so weak. I don't care for fruit soda. I especially don't care for a boozy drink that tastes like a fruit soda. If I want something "light, refreshing, and fruit-flavored sweet", I'll drink an actually refreshing non-alcoholic drink. When I drink alcohol I want to appreciate the flavor of the alcohol, not have it completely hidden like someone's roofied my drink.

Last night I watched S1E4 of The Book of Boba Fett. The series has developed nicely since its uneven start in S1E1. My concern back then was, "It's not clear why I care about these characters" — the main characters Boba Fett and Fennec Shand. If the previous episode started to make their challenges interesting, more than just a series of fight scenes between evil people, this episode is the one where I started to see them as truly sympathetic protagonists. It's also the episode where the story really comes together.

The flashback storyline reaches the point where Fett and Shand meet. That connects it with the storyline of The Mandalorian, which this series spun off from. The flashbacks also reach nearly the present day, or at least where the "present day" storyline started in S1E1.

One sign of how well the story gels in S1E4 is how I was surprised when it was over. "Wait, that's all?" I asked. "That wasn't even 30 minutes!' It was actually 47 minutes. Clearly I care about these characters, and the plot, now.

Space Millennials, Again!

This episode has another scene with what I dubbed Space Millennials in the previous episode. They're the young people who have stylish body modifications— the space version of tattoos and piercings— and own brightly colored hover mopeds— the galaxy far, far away version of expensive iPhones in conspicuous cases— all despite being apparently unemployed idlers. There's a slight spoiler in how Fett meets this gaggle so I won't go into detail on it except to note that they all seemed to be different people from the pod of Space Millennials Fett hired in S1E3. So it's just more amusing stereotyping on the part of the writers.

As I wrote about my youngest sister turning 40 recently I thought about how the 10 year age difference between us made a difference in how we grew up... and how it didn't. At age 40 my sister is technically a Millennial, while I'm squarely in the middle of Gen X. But she's at the cusp of the Millennial generation; people born just 1 year earlier are Gen X. I see in her (and her age peers) a blend of characteristics from both age cohorts.

That got me wondering, as an aside, what do you call people who are part Millennial and part Gen X?  "Xillennial", I figured. I tried searching on that term to see if anyone else is using it. I discovered that the shorter Xennial has already become somewhat common to describe this age group!

Xennials, people born in the late 70s to early 80s, really do straddle some of the cultural divides between generations. My sister matches most of the traits of this subgroup. For example:

— Xennials, like we Gen Xers, grew up using landline phones. They're familiar with hand-written lists of phone numbers on the wall and sharing a phone number with everyone in the household. They may never have "dialed" a phone, though, except at grandma's house. Mobile phones became common around the time they were in college.

— Xennials knew what life was like pre-Internet. Yet the home Internet revolution (which I peg at "later 1990s") happened while they were in high school, so it was also something they grew up with. By the time they were in college digital literacy was considered normal... at least among students. A few writers call Xennials "the AOL generation".

— Xennials, like Gen X, got through school before social media became a dominant force, along with the stresses it puts on adolescents. But social media emerged while they were still generally young enough to embrace it as new technology. One upshot is that Xennials parents, like Millennials, generally are not befuddled by their kids' devices, apps, social media, etc. Even though these things didn't exist when they were kids, Xennials started using social media for themselves before they had kids or while their kids were very young.

Are you a Xennial, or do you have close friends/relatives who are? What do you think about these comparisons?