@Supersonic_Red This is brilliant! First time I've heard of the Jones Gen, but I fit perfectly. To those that are triggered by a new demo remember, it's all made up ๐
The name has a few layered meanings that Jonathan Pontell chose deliberately:
"Keeping up with the Joneses" โ Reflects the competitive pressure, high expectations, and aspiration (or sense of always chasing something) that this group
"Jonesing" โ Slang (popularized in that era) for craving or yearning for more, capturing their restless drive and unfulfilled promises of properity.
"Jones" as an everyman name โ Symbolizing anonymity or being overlooked, as this group was often lumped in with Boomers despite feeling distinct.
Thereโs a generation a lot of people forget exists. We were born at the tail end of the Boomers, but we are not culturally the same as people born in the 40s and early 50s. We are Generation Jones.
And honestly, it explains a lot.
We grew up in a world that still felt fundamentally analog, but we were young enough to be dragged headfirst into the digital revolution. We are the bridge generation between rotary phones and smartphones, between slide rules and AI, between Walter Cronkite and algorithm driven media.
We remember when there were only a few television channels and the entire country watched the same thing at the same time. We also adapted to the internet, email, forums, social media, streaming and now artificial intelligence. We lived before and after the technological singularity hit everyday life.
That is not a small thing.
People born in the 40s came of age in a post World War II America that was still industrial, deeply hierarchical and institutionally stable. Their formative years were shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, the civil rights era and a society where information moved slowly.
Generation Jones came later. We inherited the aftermath of all of that.
We were the kids who watched Watergate destroy blind trust in government. We watched manufacturing begin to collapse. We saw divorce rates explode. We were the first truly latchkey generation in massive numbers. We learned independence early because many of us had to.
We grew up with one foot in old America and one foot in whatever this new thing was becoming.
We played outside until the streetlights came on but we also learned DOS commands. We learned cursive and keyboarding. We had card catalogs and Google searches. We went from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming in one lifetime.
We remember maps. We remember memorizing phone numbers. We remember life before GPS and before every human interaction became filtered through a screen.
And because of that, I think Generation Jones developed a very unique perspective. We are adaptable because we had no choice but to adapt. We learned technology as adults instead of being born into it. We remember a slower world but were forced to survive in a rapidly accelerating one.
That creates a very different mindset than either older Boomers or younger Gen X and Millennials.
A lot of us also reject the caricature people now associate with โBoomers.โ We were not buying houses for the cost of a sandwich in 1965. The interest rate on my first house was over 14% and that was after buying down a point. Many of us got hit by recessions, outsourcing, pension collapses and economic instability just like younger generations did. We watched promises evaporate in real time.
We understand older generations because we were raised by them. We understand younger generations because we had to evolve alongside them.
Thatโs why the Jones generation often feels culturally homeless. We are rarely discussed, rarely defined and usually lumped into categories that donโt actually fit us.
But we exist.
We are the human transition point between the industrial age and the digital age.
And frankly, there will probably never be another generation quite like us again.
@synthpolis Separating the message from the messenger: I've seen the "spend everything" versus "begin investing what you can" mindsets produce drastically different results over a decade.
Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press.
I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it.
It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix.
There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views.
Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it.
I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on...
I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube.
Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing.
Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.
Rather than starting at zero, Gain of Function documentation would have turned the virus from an unknown natural pathogen into a known engineered product with terabytes of prior characterization data. Transmission mechanics would be known. The at-risk groups could have been identified. No confusion or wasted effort on wet-market or pangolin hypotheses.
Rather than starting at zero, Gain of Function documentation would have turned the virus from an unknown natural pathogen into a known engineered product with terabytes of prior characterization data. Transmission mechanics would be known. The at-risk groups could have been identified. No confusion or wasted effort on wet-market or pangolin hypotheses.
@MsMelChen@burkeanorder One can still love America and question specific trends and directions. For the common person, what exactly is the benefit of AI? Why should they allow a data center to be built across their street?
@ExxAlerts We can separate conscription for pointless wars from beneficial national service. There are plenty of countries that mandate military or other service and are better for it.
@ihtesham2005 Dreams are ubiquitous and show us a truth. In dreaming, we create a world and insert ourselves inside it, much like the creation myths of many religions.