WTO Protest: Who Are The Protesters?

GENERATION X is the "lost generation" of young people perceived to be disaffected, directionless, and without a part to play in society.

The term captured the Zeitgeist of the early 1990s following Douglas Coupland's 1991 cult novel, Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

Generation Xers are twenty- and thirty-somethings brought up on divorce. Sometimes dubbed slackers, they are "couch potatoes" who make a conscious effort not to succeed, taking low status McJobs for which they are hopelessly overqualified.

Their "successophobia" is borne out of a fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one's childish needs will no longer be catered for. It is a retreat from adult responsibilities and/or avoiding possible failure in one's true occupation.

Generation Xers believe in Me-ism: the search by an individual, in the absence of training or traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by him/herself - most frequently, a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.

Clare Garner