Kaber's experience mirrors that of her entire generation says Berkely Sociologist Jonas Wilhelm, who has been surveying the attitudes and experiences of "Generation X" for over fifteen years. According to Wilhelm, the Xer's attitudes toward their future and their current lives have improved dramatically in the past three years. "Whatever their social status, they all seem to have one thing in common" Wilhelm explained. "Once they're on salary, life suddenly doesn't seem so bad"
Wilhelm will get no argument from Marty Baker, formerly a little-known Chicago poet who worked part-time in various coffee houses until he landed a job as foreman of a slaughter house. Now, thanks to elbow grease and a little old fashioned stinginess, Baker has job satisfaction, a BMW and a pool in his back yard. Marty keeps these things in mind when he finds himself longing for his earlier days of poverty and pensive gloom."I used to be consumed by feelings of pent up angst," Baker explained. "Now I make money and assuage my anxieties at the same time by lopping the heads off cattle."
The increase in income has not come at the expense of social activism, however, merely altered it. For instance, thousands of twentysomentings still volunteer at homeless shelters and drug rehabilitation clinics, but now they do so not out of a sense of social obligation, but out of a desire to lord their financial success over those less fortunate. "Before, when confronted with a homeless person, or a down-on-his-luck migrant farmer, I would curse the injustices of society," one volunteer states. "Now I think to myself: I could buy and sell his entire family."
Of course, not every twenty-something is embracing the new generational values. "A few people I've studied are very disturbed by the trend towards materialism," Jonas Wilhelm reported. "But then again, they're probably all artists or writers, or involved in some other worthless, low-paying profession."
