"Baby Boomers," "Twenty-somethings," "Generation X" -- it seems that every generation in recent years has been given a nick-name -- except mine. I'm not a Baby Boomer because I was born long after World War II. I'm not a "Generation Xer" because I don't fit the description and I barely fit the age-group. Ranging in age from 30 to about 36, my generation is made up of the kids who grew up during the Cold War "Evil Empire" days. Reagan was the US President for most of my youth, the Soviet Union was the villain of Hollywood spy films, the Vietnam War was already underway when I was born, and David Cassidy was the teen heart throb when I was in elementary school. We are a small generation that identify with very specific memories. When we get together, it's like reuniting with long lost soul-mates because our memories, fears, and idiosyncrasies are the same. I think of mine as the forgotten generation -- barely alive when Kennedy was shot, toddlers and pre-schoolers during the moon-landing, and high school students when the first space shuttle went up.

This has come to mind lately as I observe the twenty-somethings who are just starting their careers in my office. I'm startled by their confidence, their arrogance, their ability to make demands, and set boundaries. It makes me feel like an embittered veteran watching the rookies stomp-in, eager, and ready for the kill. How dare they walk in here like they own the world?

When I was just starting out, I was humble. I was trampled. I was willing to work all hours, for little to no pay, in order to prove my determination to be a part of the team. In essence, I was just lucky to have a job and not to be on a downsizing hit-list. I got my first real job just as the recession began. Six months after I was hired, twenty people were laid off. One by one, they filed past my desk to collect their pink slips. We were called into meetings every couple of months where we were served sandwiches and told that another round of lay-offs was imminent and to prepare for the worst. I had to give a tour of my workspace to the outside auditor to justify my position as being essential to the function of my department. We all lived on the edge, wondering who was going to be next.

So what was with these new kids? At first I thought that they were just young, '...and oh boy, just wait until they get trampled, they'll be singing a new tune.' But with every new round of hires, I felt myself getting more and more annoyed because these kids weren't rotting in one spot, they were moving up, on, and out. All my hard-work, humility, and eagerness to sell my soul to corporate America (when I all I really wanted to do was scream at all the injustice) had gotten me nowhere, except to be able to say "at least I have a job." As I looked around me to see who else was in the same boat as me, I realized that most of us were in the same age range: 30-36. We are the ones that are stuck in go-nowhere jobs. We're still working our butts off for little to no pay, and most of us are unmarried without children. If I look outside of the workplace to my friends, it is the same thing. They all go from one relationship to another, searching for the perfect mate and never being satisfied with who, and what, they find. The ones that have married, don't have children, and none of them seem content, or even committed to their careers. If the kids coming on the scene are any indication of the latest generational mind-set, then that means something went terribly wrong with mine.

This will sound extreme, but I've given it a great deal of thought, and I think much of my generation's apathy has to do with the threat of human annihilation. We were inundated with The Cold War on the news, in the movies, on television shows, in the pop music we listened to -- everything was about Armageddon -- the potentiality of it became a way of life. We also thought we were going to be the generation that finally got to benefit from the sexual revolution of the sixties and early seventies, as pre-marital sex and homosexuality became less and less taboo. What did we get? More death and destruction...we got the plague, and got to watch our friends and family members die of AIDS. So not only did we have to live with the threat of the bomb, but we couldn't even forget about it by having sex.

Although my friends and I didn't sit around thinking about the end of the world all day long, I know we all thought about the horror of being irradiated. We grew up with the knowledge that our lives were in the hands of major world powers that hated each other. We had to trust that the people of the Soviet Union loved their children as much as we were loved. We had to believe that their leaders were not evil, but good people that didn't want the end of the world any more than we did. But who could we trust? Reagan?

The man who had nothing but spiteful words to direct toward the Soviets? I think we all imagined that Reagan walked around with a little nuclear-attack-remote-control in one pocket ready to point and go, and a gun in the other in case anyone tried to stop him. We are the ones that grew up with movies that tried to conjure images of exactly what would happen if "the bomb" went off. These same movies attempted to depict the quality of life after nuclear destruction and the inevitability of human extinction. It was constantly in our face.

If the constant threat of violent death is the big picture in the eyes of a child, and a part of the culture of everyday living, it is inevitable that it is going to become part of the collective psyche of that generation, and I believe that is exactly what happened to mine. The complacency in the work place grows out of the mentality that we are just lucky to be...period. We are lucky to be alive; we are lucky to have an income; we are lucky to at least have 2 weeks vacation, a pension, and a 401K. Like we had to once trust the world powers not to hurt us, we now had to put our lives in the hands of our employers and hope for similar results.

We are not a generation of underachievers, but a scared generation of defeatist who still wonder if the Test of the Emergency Broadcast System on TV might one day be the real thing, and we might really have to head to those fall-out shelters that were previously only real in the movies.