The Big Gray

I recently wrote about being a member of Generation X, and how our youth (those damn 1980s) is the cultural touchstone and promised land for much of the MAGA movement. Yeah, it creeps me out.

One thing I didn’t mention is how, despite our inherent coolness, my fellow Gen Xers and I are getting older. I know — it all seems so impossible. But trust me, it’s happening.

In fact, an early year of my generation, 1972 to be precise, was the peak time for youth in America. By that, I mean the average age for an American has risen every year since then, to the point that the nation’s median age has reached 38.9, which is “the highest it has ever been.”

Yikes. America is one old-ass country.

What does it mean that our nation is rapidly filling up with cranky senior citizens while there are fewer young people to offset them?

Well, for starters, our population growth “has slowed significantly with an increase of only 0.5%.” There is some concern that within the next few years, America will actually lose population, which is not the sign of a vibrant country.

An aging population that has fewer young people to do all the work and keep society moving forward is a sociocultural red flag that economists call “a truly fucked-up situation,” to use the official term.

This demographic cliff is looming so large, in fact, that conservatives are shrieking nonstop that Americans need to have more babies. They mean white Christian babies of course, but even if the hyper-religious get to banging nonstop, it is unlikely to slow our nation’s slide into decrepitude.

Most political scientists believe the best way to increase the number of young people in America is to increase immigration.

Ha — that’s a good one, right?

Actually, it’s no joke.

If America is to avoid becoming one big nursing home, we need more immigrants. Unfortunately, due to right-wing lunacy and xenophobia on a massive scale, “after more than 50 years of rapid growth, the nation’s immigrant population is now in decline.”

This is good news for the racists, but bad news for just about everyone else.

Just the economic toil of decreased immigration is likely to be grim. You see, Republicans who wanted to kick immigrants out ignored “a big hole in the seductively simple argument that Mr. Trump’s policy will push employers to hire Americans: For many jobs, the cheaper and more likely replacement is a robot.” And those jobs that can't be done by robots “will simply leave the country.”

So much for a job boom for those angry, native-born Americans who thought their high school diplomas were good enough. They believed they could have a strong economy and mass deportations, but both are turning out to be pathetic delusions.

And speaking of robots, keep in mind that artificial intelligence is poised to trigger “a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, [and] the consequences will not stop at the economy,” testing political institutions “that have already shown how brittle they can be.”

These factors are combining to create a picture of the future that is, well, not so very bright. To be honest, it’s fairly horrifying. 

So what are the ultimate consequences of an aging population, fewer immigrants to take care of old people, and AI taking over?

Well, for one thing, Gen X will need lots of robots to keep us alive.

Knowing my generation’s luck, our robotic caregivers will be on glitchy beta test and fry us.

This would all be much simpler if we weren’t so bigoted. But that’s not the American way. 

Just ask the next furious old man you see. He will be easy to find, because soon, the country will be nothing but the elderly, tumbleweeds, and reminiscing about the good old days.