Disco, not hippies: Generation Jones says it has little in common with baby boomers

Let’s face it, not many young people appreciate baby boomers. And, it turns out, even boomers don’t like boomers.

While more than half of millennials and 42% of Generation Xers say that boomers “made life worse” for them, almost one-third of boomers believe that, too.

What’s the source of boomer-on-boomer bitterness? It could well be Generation Jones.

A generation hidden within a generation, Generation Jones is a term social commentators affix to younger, tail-end boomers — people who came of age in the disco-, punk-, and Watergate-obsessed 1970s, not the hippie-spawning; Vietnam War-protesting; sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll 1960s.

Jonsers resent being lumped in with flower-power boomers. They believe they share few traits and cultural touchstones with a noisy cohort that overshadowed them.

The name Jones — conjured up by cultural critic Jonathan Pontell in 1999 — refers to the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses,” as well as the drug-use slang of “jonesing,” or craving more.

Generation Jones makes up roughly 53 million of the boomer generation’s 76 million people. In Philadelphia and its four collar counties, there are about 593,000 Generation Jones members (66%), compared to around 302,000 older boomers (34%), according to data analyzed for The Inquirer by Allen Glicksman of NewCourtland, a Germantown agency that helps seniors.

Older boomers born between 1946 and 1953, are now about 70 to 77 years old. The Generation Jones folks arrived between 1954 and 1964 (some say 1965), and are around 59 to 69 years old. The group includes Madonna, Magic Johnson, Bill Gates, Princess Diana, and Barack Obama, who once declared himself “the first Generation Jones president.”

While many Jonesers have achieved financial success, analysts say, a large proportion has been harmed by an economy that changed dramatically as they came of age, eventually bypassing them altogether. Feeling forsaken, some stew in a culture of grievance that’s helped splinter America into warring tribes.

Beyond that, as Jonesers begin to retire, many face financial uncertainty their older brethren never did.

Darlene M. Temple, 65, of West Mount Airy, who retired from a management position at Amtrak, said she never felt connected to the baby boom generation.

“I didn’t know anything about Woodstock or the shootings at Kent State [University],” she said. “Growing up in Mount Airy, there were no riots like in the ‘60s, I wasn’t a hippie, I wasn’t smoking reefer.”

Her husband, Marq, also 65 and former executive director of the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center, agreed: “The Vietnam War was over when I was in the 11th grade. That was the group before me.”

Susan Meyer, 63, who taught philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, said she was “shocked to be classified as a boomer, a show-offy generation that took up all the cultural space.”

Then older boomers “became dinosaurs, and the country started talking about millennials.”

“I was left wondering, ‘What about me?’ ” Meyer said.

Then, of course, there were the leisure suits and Disco Inferno.

“In the 1970s, the clothes were terrible,” said Sharon Dietrich, 62, an attorney for Community Legal Services. “And hardly any of that crap has made a comeback.”

Dietrich was envious of 1960s music, though — the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison. “We had that god-awful disco thing.”

As it aged, Generation Jones changed boomer politics along with the music. They proved to be more Republican and conservative than older boomers, and are said to have helped elect George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Despite that, political analysts say, many Jonesers are swing voters vigorously courted by both parties.

When Generation Jones members came of age in the 1970s, said Temple University professor Bryant Simon, “the political urgency of the 1960s, and the sense of unity, were gone.”

The era’s galvanizing cause — the Vietnam War — was over, and the later boomers, who had neither fought nor protested it, began a new age dubbed the “Me Decade.” It was marked by narcissism and lack of social concern, according to writer Tom Wolfe. This was, of course, the generation that spawned yuppies in the 1980s.

As Joneser and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan (a Valley Forge native) wrote in the New York Times in 2020, “If the zeitgeist of the boomers was optimism and revolution, the vibe of Gen Jones was cynicism and disappointment.” She quoted journalist Richard Pérez-Peña, who wrote that while older boomers “may have wanted to change the world ... most of my peers just wanted to change the channel.”

That attitude helped much of Generation Jones do quite well financially, according to economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics.

But not everyone prospered. Generation Jones graduated high school and college into the 1970s-’80s economy marked by high unemployment, wage stagnation, weakening unions, and a changeover from manufacturing to a service economy.

Simon, 61, who grew up in Vineland, N.J., said many working-class Jonesers he knew felt left behind by the changing economy.

A “white fragility” has developed among them that’s fostered anger about being left behind.

Indeed, a few of the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were Jonesers fueled by 40 years of resentment, analysts say.

“You could argue,” Simon concluded, “that, in the end, this generation created the fracture we have in America today.”

While many Generation Jones members have retired, according to David Yamada, a law professor at Suffolk University in Boston, most are still “barreling toward it.”

And that’s a problem.

Yamada said many Jonesers “face a coming retirement-savings crisis. I’m very concerned what later life will look like for them.”

Generation Jones is the first cluster of Americans that must rely on 401(k) plans for retirement rather than fixed pensions. More than 40 years ago, employers began shifting the market risk of amassing retirement benefits to their employees, Boston College economist Anqi Chen said in an interview.

After the Great Recession, many of these people had lower earnings, less 401(k) participation, and flat 401(k) balances, Chen added. And, they endured another hit from recent market dips.

Combine 401(k) dependence with cuts to Social Security payments over the years, and you can see where aging members of Generation Jones could find themselves worse off than their parents, said economist Teresa Ghilarducci, of the New School of Social Research.

One result: “This generation will be kept working longer,” Loyola University sociologist Rhys Williams said.

Sharon Dietrich of CLS said that describes her life: “I lost so much in my 401(k) in the last 18 months, I’ll have to keep going just to recover that.”

She’s not alone.

“The way it looks,” she said, “it’s an uncertain future for many of the children of the ‘70s.”