To explain the pop-culture focus on hardscrabble survival during the 1990s, in everything from start-ups to hookups, we could point to an under-socialized youth generation who were coming of age after a throwaway Awakening-era childhood. These were Gen-Xers (of the Nomad archetype), and they were now replacing Boomers as rising young adults. Their favorite new mottoes (“Just don’t care,” “Works for me”) celebrated an ethic of help-yourself pragmatism, and their favorite generational nonlabel (the evasive X itself) was meant to deflect the hypocritical moralism of former hippies hitting
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