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The boomers represent an influential iteration of Buddhist modernism in the West. How, then, should the NextGen of teachers be positioned and understood in relationship to them? This chapter attempts to answer this question by exploring the experience of Gen X teachers. Drawing primarily on thirty-three interviews with Gen X teachers, it identifies what they see as the main characteristics and concerns of their generation. It considers how they locate themselves in relationship to the boomer generation as well as Asian Buddhism and how they are simultaneously continuing and countering the modernization process. Rather than present their perspectives as facts, the chapter offers them as “ideal types” that indicate the main directions Buddhist modernism is headed in a shifting American cultural landscape.

The interviewees are categorized according to age cohorts and types. Although there were few “nones” who volunteered to be interviewed from “The Greatest Generation” (1901?1924), there were many women and men who came forward from “The Silent Generation” (1925?1945), “The Baby Boomers” (1946?1964), “Gen X” (1965?1981), and “Millennials” (born after 1981). The most enthusiastic interviewees were Baby Boomers and women. Cutting across the generations were five distinct types: Dissenters (those who object to specific doctrines or practices in religion and have either left or drifted away), Casuals (those who take spirituality and religion on an “as-needed” basis), Explorers (those who have a spiritual “wanderlust,” like spiritual tourists), Seekers (those who are looking for a more or less permanent spiritual home), and Immigrants (those who are trying out a new religion or spirituality but, like immigrants, may be having difficulty adjusting). Examples and many illustrative quotes from each generation and type are given.

This chapter asks whether the Baby Boomer and Gen Xer generations will have enough to retire on. While it is widely accepted that employment-based retirement plans have played a significant role in providing retirement income to American workers, this chapter quantifies the impact that those programs have in the determination of retirement income adequacy. The analysis in this chapter employs the EBRI Retirement Security Projection Model (RSPM) to reveal that one of the most important factors in determining whether Gen Xers would have sufficient retirement resources is eligibility for participation in an employment-based defined contribution (DC) plan.

A relatively new construction in colloquial English contains the obligatorily pitch-accented word “so” followed by a constituent that is not of the syntactic category that "so" typically modifies (e.g., "Jamie SO [dates that sort of guy]"). This chapter describes the distribution of this construction, “drama ‘so’” (originally termed "Gen-X -so-"), and argues that “so” is an ordinary degree word that modifies an unpronounced element, the silent speaker-oriented adverb “totally,” where speaker-oriented “totally” is itself relatively new (e.g., "We totally might go out tonight"). The proposed analysis explains certain properties of drama “so,” such as the fact that it cannot be scoped over by a truth-conditional operator like negation. The curious properties of drama “so” are thus due to the properties of speaker-oriented “totally.”