It was the early 1990s and recent college grad Stephanie Brail was doing precisely what someone of her generation was supposed to be doing. Nothing.
Like many so-called Gen-Xers, the 80 million Americans born from 1961 to 1981, she was rudderless. The English and music major drifted for several years, working at a nonprofit here, writing a freelance piece there. In between, there was a lot of time in coffeehouses.
Eventually, she started to teach courses about computers, something she had used in one form or another since childhood. Soon people--particularly baby boomers less comfortable with the emerging technology--hired her to create Web pages. By 1996, she had established her own business, now known as Herspace Media Inc., a profitable and respected Web design firm in Venice.
"I took the slacker route [to success]," jokes the 29-year-old. "I know there is this cultural stereotype that we're lazy, but you know all these Internet companies are built on Gen-X kids working 80-hour weeks. We're a bunch of maniacs."
This wasn't supposed to happen. Ever. Earlier this decade, Gen-Xers were supposed to be headed straight for Palookaville. They were supposed to enter a dismal economy with low-wage/low-benefit jobs or to find none at all. And if there were jobs, they were supposed to be too busy playing computer games, watching television or being alienated to earn a paycheck.
But, in an irony befitting the marked generation, something happened on the way to the millennium. Slacker successes seem as plentiful as Web sites these days. Business journals have dubbed them the Entrepreneurial Generation and often feature rags-to-riches tales such as that of 30-year-old Jerry Yang, the billionaire co-founder of Yahoo, and 28-year-old Sky Dayton, the multimillionaire behind Pasadena-based Earthlink, to name a couple.
Instead of inheriting McJobs, they've created a Jobs.com world. For the past couple of years, they've started their own businesses at more than twice the rate of other Americans.
To be sure, they're not all getting rich. They still lag behind boomers in relative earning power at comparable ages. And some are trapped in temp positions. But the point is: Beavis and Butt-head have clicked off MTV, are off the couch and are working. Very hard.
"Those slacker stereotypes were just silly. Totally irrelevant," said Fernando Torres-Gil, director of the UCLA Center for Policy Research on Aging. The people of this generation "are very serious. They are very focused. They embody the traditional American virtue of self-reliance."
