Boomer No More (Or, Keeping Up With The Joneses)

I have tried to live a decent life, and one of the things I have been pretty proud of is that I have behaved well enough to have never been kicked out of anything. I was not kicked out of school, was not kicked out of my home or even kicked out of a job. But now, and though no fault of my own, I discover that I have been kicked out of my generation. I am, it seems, not a Baby Boomer any more.

During my life, few things have been as constant as the slowly evolving generational cohorts that have predominated in American society. There were those who came before me (like the Greatest/WWII and Silent generations) and those who came after (who got identified by letters like “X” and “Y”). But the big blob in the middle of it all was the Baby Boomers. It was demographic gospel that those of us born between 1946 and 1964 were the Baby Boomers.

Which makes perfect sense, because of the large number of kids born during that two-decade span. Does this explain why our parents were either Great or Silent? Maybe or maybe not, but in those years before “The Pill”, people did what people do and babies were the result. Lots and lots and lots of babies.

But this past week I learned that I am apparently not a Baby Boomer any more. I was, you see, born in 1959. A year that once looked so normal on the printed page, but which now looks like ancient history. But I digress. This puts me, according to those who study such things, as a person solidly in the middle of something called “Generation Jones”. Generation Jones, it seems, is a newly discovered cohort that is sandwiched between those who have not been kicked out of the Boomer club (or, for that matter, not been kicked out of Generation X.)

OK, maybe Generation Jones is not newly discovered. The cohort seems to have been identified and named as early as the late 1990’s by a “cultural commentator” named Jonathan Pontell. Pontell (a Joneser himself) came up with the term, which has a dual meaning – we Jonesers were always anonymous next to the “real” Boomers. And, because we have always felt like we got the short end of things, we had to keep up with the the elder members of our cohort. I probably did not notice anything about this new demographic category at the time because I was busy raising young Millennials. And maybe because nobody (meaning early Boomers) took it seriously.

The boundaries of we Jonesers seem to be a little fluid at the moment. I have seen sources that start the cohort with those born as early as 1953 and as late as 1957. And the end dates seem to float between 1965 (the traditional start of GenX) and 1967. So, for any GenXers who find yourselves kicked out of your generation too, welcome aboard the S.S. Jones. Pontell chose Jones boundaries as 1954-1965, although in my experience I would shift the whole thing a year or two later. Like with time zones, trying to define the outer boundaries of a generational cohort is messy business.

I will confess that I have always considered Boomers to be made of of two separate and distinct groups. In my own mind, I thought of them as Early Boomers and Late Boomers. To me, the Early Boomers have always kind of seemed like the insufferable, entitled elder siblings who treated those of us on the other end like kids who were to be shooed off to play. They grew up during Camelot, while we grew up during Watergate, stagflation and malaise. They got the cool cars and the cool music and never let the rest of us forget it when “Frampton Comes Alive” or “Saturday Night Fever” were what was available in record stores for our group. Older boomers got to break all the rules and left those of us on the other end to handle the fallout (like with herpes jokes and 12% car loans). But even if I was an irritating little brother, I was still part of that big Boomer family. Until now.

Still, it is easy to understand how those of my age group have so little in common with “true” Boomers. This chart, which I found somewhere online, has much truth in it. I was always a little outside of mainstream fads and tastes, but I recognize in the Jones column many of the tastes of those who grew up with me. If I could add a line for “Defining car”, it would go like this: Pontiac GTO (Boomers), Mustang II (Jones) and BMW 3 Series (GenX). See what I mean? Or maybe we Jonesers could at least claim the Smoky And The Bandit Pontiac Firebird. You know, the black one with the monstrous golden bird decal on the hood as shown in the opening photo.

At least I have plenty of company as a Gen Joneser. Notable Jonesies (past and present) include actors Tom Cruse (1962) and Sandra Bullock (1964), musicians Michael Jackson (1958) and Weird Al Yankovic (1959) and sports figures like Cal Ripken, Jr. (1960) and Magic Johnson (1959). If I have to be kicked out of a generation, a lot of other people got kicked out with me.

I suppose I am prepared to make peace with a new generational cohort. And the great news is that when I hear a younger person saying “Okay, Boomer”, I know that they are not talking to me! But I just wish my new demographic home was named something else. Because “Generation Jones” sounds completely stupid.

49 thoughts on “Boomer No More (Or, Keeping Up With The Joneses)”

  1. Well, given the amount of scorn and derision the Boomers have more or less rightly earned over the Awakening of the Kids-These-Days, I suppose there’s a benefit to being evicted.

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    • Haha, I can see that!

      Seriously, you make an interesting point – I don’t ever recall people of my age group heaping scorn on the demographic groups of my parents or grandparents, but Boomers seem to be catching a lot of flak lately. That would be an interesting thing to read more about, because it seems to be happening a lot. And not without some reason, given the state of things.

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      • I think we can all throw some shade at the generation(s) that come before us. Sometimes without justification and sometimes with valid reason.

        I tend to go a bit further back than Boomers or Jonses with some criticism; but that’s getting more in the weeds than is good in public, probably. 🤔

        It’ll be fun when my grandkid starts blaming me/my generation (Talkin’ ’bout my…) for all the crap he’s dealing with. 😀

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  2. Both Generation Jones (and Generation Xennial, seen in your picture above) are new to me. Although, where Generation Xennial overlaps Gen X and Millennials, I am wondering if perhaps Jones also overlaps the Boomers.

    The Graduate could have easily lived in an Animal House. Cats leave lots of Hair. Making Love, Not War is conducive for one to Have A Nice Day. Burning a Bra may necessitate Streaking.

    Or maybe Jones is simply an extension or subset of Boomers. My previous paragraph is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I could not make such connections between Jones and X.

    Regardless, I do find the generational differences interesting, much as I do the variances in traits due to birth order. One can see the differences but they get tough to quantify at times.

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    • Whether Jones is a subset of Boomer is an interesting question. On one level, Jones was carved out of Boomers, so yes. On the other side, those of us at the tail end of the old Boomer definition never felt like we were part of the same cohort as those born a decade or more ahead of us because so many of our mass experiences were so totally different. For example, older Boomers were into protests at college. In my age group, only nut cases protested anything, and we (though not me) were more inclined to rejuvenate fraternities and sororities or just spend our weekends at keg parties.

      I had not noticed the Xennial thing in the graphic until you mentioned it. It is the only one of the bunch that overlaps the cohort on either side of it, so is it really its own thing? My two younger brothers are smack in the middle of GenX and my kids are Y/Millenials. It is funny listening to the kids complaining about the work ethic of the group that follows them. 🙂

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  3. Here is my list:

    Catchphrase: Take off Eh! (Bob and Doug)

    TV Family – I Love Lucy

    Movie – The Godfather

    Musical – Joseph and the Amazing Dreamcoat

    Elvis – Old School

    Rebellious Music – New Wave

    Poet – Neal Peart

    Haircut – Mullett

    Jewelry – no preference

    Drug – Hashish

    War – Wrath of Khan

    Scandal – Um, it’s happening today and until 2028 or so

    Subversion – World Series won in Canada 1992-93

    Not sure now if I am a Jones or a Boomer or a hybrid. But this is a fun article! Def a keeper!

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  4. I was born in 1954, and I’ve been complaining and redefining the concept of “boomer” for over 30 years now! When I first read of the “Generation Jones” theory the early 2000’s (I believe it was identified in 1999), I thought: “…someone is finally paying attention to me!”.

    Having been in advertising and advertising related businesses for my entire career, I can say there’s been a lot of push-back against the definition of generations with such a wide spread of years for a long time now. The “boomers” being defined as usually between 1944 and 1964, were based on the concept that it covered most likely the youngest and oldest children spawned in a family by the generation that came back from WW2 as adults., as well as kids that were born from families that did not immediately get married on the return from WW2. This is easily seen in my own family, where there were four kids covering a birth spread of almost 10 years. As societal trends accelerate, this kind of breadth of ages in a defined group seem out of place.

    When the Gen XYZ’s give me trouble about the “boomers” stealing everything, I tell them the following: The leading edge of the baby boomers were out of college before I was in high school; the job growth associated with administrating to this “bulge” in the consumer-sphere were already hired and in place by the time I got out of college (it was a tough job market for me, not aided by the Arab oil embargo in 1973); when I got out of college wide benefit union jobs were already dying, and defined pension benefit programs had mostly been killed as well replaced by not very good IRA;s and 401 (k)’s by the late ’70’s and early ’80’s; and business migration to southern states to save taxes had already started in earnest.

    I tell the “gen-ers”, their battle is with people born between 1944 and about 1950; it isn’t with me!

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    • As a 1954 baby, you are definitely on the bleeding edge between the two cohorts. But you are right that the Jones thing gives voice to those of us on the younger end of the Boomer spread who got a completely different experience (from childhood to even now) from those a decade older.

      You also remind me that how a generation works through life is partly about how the people in it act, but also partly how they react to the forces going on around them. The older Boomers certainly had the Viet Nam war on their minds by the mid 1960’s, and that was something we never had to deal with. I am even in that narrow range of guys who never even had to register with the Selective Service. But on the other hand, I have never forgotten a piece I read in a magazine in the waiting room of a doctor’s office several decades ago. Novelist James Michener wrote a retrospective on his generation (he was on the cusp of the Greatest Generation) in which he admitted that his cohort spoiled their children too much. I think that early Boomers (though no fault of their own) were raised by people who had experienced a lot of hardship (economic depression and world war) and who were determined that their own kids would be shielded from that.

      It also occurs to me that members of the Silent Generation (like my parents) probably felt like Jonsers in comparison with their elders (Greatest Generation). I don’t think the Silent Generation ever got a member elected to President. I guess there was Biden (1942), but he was really on the cusp of Boomerdom.

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      • To show you how much “on the edge” between age groups I am, I was actually in the last draft for Vietnam (luckily with a high number that would have never been drafted), and then half way though, the draft was cancelled. People 3 years younger than I am wouldn’t have even cared about any of that…

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  5. As someone who was born in 1962, this new classification reflects what I and others of my generation have felt for a long time. The draft ended while we were in elementary school, and the Vietnam War ended two years later (with the collapse of South Vietnam). That was before any of us could even drive. As Andy Umbo notes, those issues weren’t even on our radar.

    The counterculture was represented less by Woodstock and Love-Ins and more by the Manson Family. (Helter Skelter was published in 1974, and was made into a two-part television movie for 1976 that garnered blockbuster ratings. It scared the living daylights out of us in the eigth grade.). The nasty side effects of illicit drug use were already becoming apparent, although replacing those drugs with alcohol (Animal House) brought its own set of issues.

    Most muscle cars for sale were well-worn junkers that could be bought with earnings from a part-time job and a little help from parents. When we graduated from high school or college, the economy of the early 1980s that greeted us was hardly booming – the country was grappling with double-digit inflation, high unemployment and disappearing industrial jobs.

    Not the same set of experiences of someone born between 1946 and roughly 1956.

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    • All great points that echo my own experience. I graduated college in 1982, which may have been the worst economy since WWII. I had been ambivalent about law school, but in those conditions it was a no-brainer.

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  7. I too was born in 1959, and like Andy has pointed out the ‘boom times’ had passed long before I came of age. Graduated from college in 1981, at which time jobs in the trades as well as professional jobs were in short supply. I survived a couple years by bartending at night and doing maintenance work for the city parks department during the day, while living in cheap college housing with several roommates. (oh boo hoo, woe is me right?). After finally entering the professional world (my first salary was $14k annually!) the wife and I were able to secure a mortgage in 1985 at a lovely 13%. I’m not complaining, but I also have felt a million years away from being a ‘boomer’.

    Loved your comment: “the Early Boomers have always kind of seemed like the insufferable, entitled elder siblings who treated those of us on the other end like kids who were to be shooed off to play”. 

    I find ‘generation Jones’ to be kind of silly. I propose we rename it to “Generation Wallace”.

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    • Things have moved fast, and I guess we have to keep up! I’m just bothered that we cannot have a consistent naming system for these generational cohorts. Like why did the next one start with X?

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  9. I am still a Baby Boomer but apparently my remaining three siblings are being Jonesed out. I do not know if they have been notified yet. Perhaps your Blog is making that announcement. Since the trio is between 8-12 years younger than me, they have always thought of me as part of an older generation. And who gets to decide on these categories and the names, anyway?

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    • Haha, there’s a great idea – the categories remain static and we move through them. And whether I would rather be silent or lost is a great question. Another is what we called “Greatest” before Tom Brokaw wrote his book “The Greatest Generation”? I think the book changed that cohort’s name.

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  12. I’d have to pick the Formans of That ’70s Show over the Bradys for favorite TV family. Granted, it didn’t air until I was well into my 30s but I still find it incredibly relatable.

    And Cats? Puh-leeze…Tommy all the way!

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  13. I discovered the Generation Jones thing not so long ago, having read about it somewhere online, and even though I sort of naturally bristle at these “Generation [whatever]” things I have to say that the reveal of Generation Jones was somewhat like one of those movies where the long lost orphan finally meets his true family and everything just clicks into place.

    I have simply never felt at home with Boomers. All of that nostalgia about anti-war protesting, bra and draft card burning, and Bob Dylan…It just never clicked with me. Not that I would have supported “The War” (I guess that was back when there was only one), but 7 year old me was quite busy watching Gilligan’s Island reruns and Adam-12 in 1968. I was more about that than Kent State. By the time I was old enough to realize the significance of what had been happening during my personal 3 hour tour (3 hour tour), well, it all seemed like history created by people much older than me

    That Boomer/Generation Jones/Gen X table captures my feelings well. I only disagree with Favorite Musical and Drug of Choice. The former because I had the Hair soundtrack record, and loved the Age of Aquariums song (as a 7 or 8 year old). The latter because I went to a college that was very attached to the Boomer era, founded by Hippies, and attended by wannabees. The Boomers’ drug of choice still flowed quite freely when Gen Jones got there.

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    • Yes, I think you and I share a lot here. I remember hearing about Kent State (I had relatives in Ohio so it was fairly close to home) but personally I was more concerned with my new bike and camping with my scout troop.

      As for overall temperament, I identified more with guys like Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke and then James Garner (Rockford!) than I did with hippies.

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  14. I am on the tail end of the Boomer category. I am glad I was a kid when ‘free range’ described a type of childhood, not the kind of chickens people choose for eggs and meat. I am glad I was a kid before TV, the internet and cell phones. I am glad we felt safe enough to walk to and from school, no matter how many miles that might be. I am thankful I was raised in a country where politics was something you only thought about a day or two before you went to vote!

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    • I agree with all of the above. Kids going out after breakfast on a summer day and not coming home until dinner was a great way to live. Even if it would get parents arrested now.

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  15. Hmm – this was a fun post JP. I see that I am in the Generation Jones category too since I was born in 1956. I saw something about this on social media, but figured “well, I’m a Boomer, not one of those!” Guess I should have read past the headline and not been snobby! Perhaps if they would have included the chart you have in this post, I might have given it a closer look. There are a lot of nostalgic sites on social media about things kids in the 60s, 70s and 80s did, watched, listened to, wore, etc. and looking back at those photos (dare I say “vintage” photos), I realize we had it great because life was simple. Maybe that was because I had no siblings? I am happy I grew up in a simpler era and many times I have even envied life from the 1950s and would have enjoyed being a teen in that era, rather than the 60s and I think I may have even mentioned that to you in the past.

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  16. As an aside to my above comments, this entry has started me thinking about other incidents of “boomer confusion”. When I had my advertising photography studio in the 80’s, I remember doing a lot of “boomer targeted” advertising that played off of shows like Happy Days (whose producer was from Milwaukee), sock hops, benevolent greasers like “The Fonz”, and Elvis era music. Me being born in 54, this stuff was as foreign to me as flappers and bathtub gin. I kept asking these art directors that were seemingly not that much older than me, what their connection was with all this stuff?

    I was 10 years old when the Beatles hit America in ’64. Our arguments on the grade school playground were: “who was better, the Beatles or the Dave Clark Five”. This was about the same time I got my first transistor radio. Elvis to us was some weird southern greaser that was kind of creepy. We never hung around a drive-in getting malts, I wasn’t anywhere near a drive-in, we might meet our pals at the nearest McDonalds. There were no such things as “benevolent greasers” like The Fonz, there were just pretty scary factory kids that were like that; who were into mindless violence, criminal activity, and who we avoided like the plague. I couldn’t tell you what a sock-hop was, the closest thing was possibly the CYO dance in the grade school basement for 7th and 8th graders.

    When I was 14 years old, or around there, is when our local college radio station started playing music from bands like the Soft Machine, Moody Blues, and King Crimson. We never listened to commercial AM radio again!

    The focus on some sort of “sunny day” version of Happy Days by the media, as some sort of bridge to the baby boom generation was certainly lost on me and carried on in the media far longer than it should have been. Advertising and the media gave longer “legs” to the leading edge of baby boom experience than ever existed in real life.

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    • Great point. Yes, with stuff like Happy Days, they were selling Early Boomer nostalgia and we late Boomers were along for the ride. The world of The Sting or The Godfather was as far removed from my life as the world of Happy Days was.

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  17. I’m early X. I have more to in common with you, JP, than with someone born at the end of my cohort. I love the generation names for some broad ways of describing how old people are, but within any generation there are variations over time.

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    • Those of you on the boundaries don’t have the easy identification those of us in the middle have. The guy who identified and named the Jones group argued that lived experience was more relevant to a generation than the accident of a birth year.

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      • This whole subject reminds me of a fascinating lecture I attended during one of the retail advertising conventions I went to in Chicago some time in the mid-90’s. The lecture was by a person named Ken Dychtwald, and it was about his “age wave” theory. There were many fascinating, data driven, characterizations of people and how they looked at the world and comported themselves as they aged through their lives. The two points I remember specifically, was that society was rapidly moving from a model where people were being educated, then had an extensive work life, then retiring and living for themselves; to a model where people were vacillating between education and work in smaller increments, possible going back to school multiple times in a life and getting employed in different disciplines. The second thing I remember is that you could take almost any group of people at any age bracket, and define how they looked and life, spent and saved money, thought about education, and comported themselves on a daily basis; based on what they were doing and thinking between their late teens and late 20’s!

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  18. A well-researched and insightful post as usual. My catchphrase for all of this? I don’t know and I don’t care. Technically, by the chart I would be a Jones (Why not Smith? Or Bunkowski?), 1960, but I can relate to much of all three. I call horse-hockey!

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  19. The chart is absolutely telling, as much for what I am (a Jones) as what I am not. I had to look up “Profumo” because I’d never heard the name. On the flip side I couldn’t tell you the first thing about Cobain, ecstasy, or moshing. I’d describe myself as “on the sidelines” of the Jones column, but the items certainly describe my generation to a tee.

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    • Plus One for Dave. I was surprised that the Profumo scandal was even listed. The only reason I knew anything at all about the scandal, is that there was a famous photo of Christine Keeler by Morley that we studied in college. She was the “love interest” in the scandal. This was really a Brit scandal in 1963, and way off the radar of Americans, even Boomers. An odd choice:

      https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-making-of-an-iconic-image-christine-keeler-1963?srsltid=AfmBOop7fT2ornC42rptZDGfP8Ja2ZXgBK6dgOfcYPwidLT8Kr6tXvc_

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      • The Wikipedia article on the Profumo affair made for interesting reading, especially with the alleged connection with the Russians. Keeler may not have been “worldly” but she certainly made a name for herself by default, kind of like Marilyn Monroe. Now that I think about it, Monroe would’ve been the better choice for the Boomers column.

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    • It’s a good point about being on the sidelines as I think that’s a point to be made about all of these generational identifiers once they become identifiers. I still have no idea what “Profumo” is. Cobain, sure. Moshing…yeah. Ecstasy…well, it wasn’t as good as what the chart says was the Boomers’ d o c.

      I more identify with things such as what J P noted earlier in the comments about graduating college into one of the worst economies ever. Me in 1983, and I opted for working in a toy store and then secretarial work instead of law school, but I digress.

      I think things like the actual historical facts such as what kind of economy one comes of age into are much more important than the accoutrements such as music and dance. And whatever Profumo is.

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  20. Interesting article as usual JP. I am a Joneser too. I’ve often thought that the twenty year age span of the so called boomer generation was way too broad. Being smack in the middle I can relate to neither the older boomers nor the younger ones. Even within the older boomers there is a span of those who tend to be more conservative like their parents, and the so-called rebellious hippies of the era. I think that is the problem with my book club as the members are all ten years older than me and it’s like a different generation. What I know of most of that is from social media, certainly nothing I actually experienced.

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    • That’s interesting about being placed almost dead middle and not feeling really at home with either Boomer half. And that’s a good point about the book club. I really miss the earlier generations because I always felt at home around them – something not always true with older Boomers.

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