Generation Jones: Stuck Between Woodstock and Wi-Fi

Now there’s finally a place for those of us who’ve spent our lives wandering the wilderness between Generation X and the Boomers, clutching a faded mixtape and a vague sense of being slightly misplaced. We are Generation Jones.

The name is hardly evocative. It sounds less like a generation and more like a mid-level accountant who never returned your calls. Still, after decades of being waved vaguely in the direction of “older” or “younger,” we’ll take it.

Never heard of Generation Jones? Of course you haven’t. The name appears to have been chosen by someone who ran out of flair halfway through the alphabet and thought, Jones… yes, that feels adequately underwhelming.

Generation Jones, born 1954 to 1965 : young enough to have marched, protested or at least argued loudly about the Vietnam War, but old enough to have paid full price for vinyl, petrol and optimism. We didn’t set fire to the establishment, but we loosened a few bolts. We didn’t invent TikTok, but we did invent working hard, turning up on time, and wondering later why none of that came with a house.

We arrived just in time to miss the good jobs, the affordable homes and the gold-plated pensions — but early enough to develop lower back pain, a deep knowledge of interest rates, and a suspicious relationship with carbohydrates.

Boomers look at us and say, “You had every opportunity.”
Gen X looks at us and says, “Why are you still talking?”

We remember rotary phones, but also own smartphones that we mostly use by enlarging the text and accidentally taking photos of our own noses. We were raised to believe hard work paid off, only to discover it mainly pays off in stress rashes, orthotics and a chair that costs more than our first car.

We’re wary of avocado toast, but will absolutely eat it if someone else is paying.

Our cultural references confuse everyone. We know every word to Grease and can still picture John Travolta dancing without irony or knee braces. We lived through disco, punk, power ballads and shoulder pads — and survived long enough to be blamed for all of it.

We were promised the future. What we got was a user manual written in six-point font, passwords that must include a hieroglyph, and an instruction to “reset the router” like that explains anything.

So yes, Generation Jones isn’t flashy. It doesn’t whine. It gets on with things. But at last we have a name — a proper chronological peg — for that lifelong feeling of being just slightly out of step with the generations on either side of us.

Not lost.
Not forgotten.
Just finally acknowledged.

Welcome home.