Penelope Trunk presents 4 recession-based trends. You can read them here.
As we’d expect from Penelope (who once told us her original name was Adrienne – definitely not a fit), these tips are edgy and, in this case, right on. We can expect
(1) Cost-cutting
(2) Sex (You’re on your own on this one)
(3) Revenge of Gen X-ers
(4) Companies saving on recruiting (so you’ll need new job hunting strategies)
Scariest thought: Barack Obama is our first Gen X president.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting article. No worries…you don’t need to be scared because Obama is certainly not a Gen Xer. Virtually no prominent voices anywhere have said he is an Xer (Penelope Trunk is neither a generations expert nor prominent). By contrast, many influential voices have repeatedly said that Obama–born 1961–is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) specifically use this term to describe Obama.
Here is a recent op-ed about Obama as the first GenJones President in USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm
And here is a recent interview with the guy who coined the term “Generation Jones”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBk1GZ747F8
And this really is an interesting blog, but given its name and theme, I’m very surprised to see no discussion of Generation Jones anywhere. Given the ability of the net and blogs to stay on top of new trends, and given that the Associated Press’ annual Trend Report chose The Rise of Generation Jones as the #1 trend of 2009, perhaps you’d consider exposing your readers to Generation Jones?
Thanks for the comment. I’ll keep an eye out for interesting stories about Gen Jones! Most midliife career changers like to call themselves Boomers. It seems that Gen Jones is applied to these folks by others, not by themselves. But I’ll look into it and welcome comments by others.