Gen X Man's conflicted call to greatness
An exhortation to my generation
This is part 2 of a four-part exploration of the inner life of men of different generations.
Part 1 - late Millennials
Part 2 - Gen X (this essay)
Part 3 - Boomers
Part 4 - Zoomers
Friends - It took me three drafts and the help of a friend to realize that I am Gen X Man and Gen X Man is me. Typical Gen X detachment. 😂😂 - Jeff
The first thing you notice about Gen X Man is that you don’t notice him. He’s the one listening to you. You love being around him for this reason. He’s so interesting! Then you realize you know nothing about him. That’s because he’s probably grey-rocking you, YOU NARCISSIST.
But seriously, Gen X Man is like that. We are good listeners, deflectors, undercover superheroes who do more than the culture acknowledges. We are the middle-child of generations, the ones who won Gold at the competition and picked up the medal alone because our parents were otherwise occupied. Don’t be sad for us — we’re ok with it. In fact, we’d rather you not read this. We don’t want to be seen. As the great Kurt Cobain noted: With the lights out, it’s less dangerous.
I am Gen X Man — born in the mid-70s, the fourth of five kids. As a child, I sat in the far back of our wood-paneled station wagon and sang songs with my family. I shared Bubble Yum with my siblings and a bedroom with my younger brother. We were Mormon in Marin County California and upwardly middle-class. I vaguely remember Jaws and Star Wars and a record player playing the soundtrack from Grease.
Then we moved to preppy Connecticut, a divorce followed, and my mom moved me and my younger brother cross-country once again to her hometown in crunchy Oregon. Things changed. I became a latch-key kid with a single mom. Our wood-paneled wagon became a wood-paneled Wagoneer. My preppy country-day school became a flannel-filled public junior high. I made my own dinners and got a job at Taco Bell at age 14. I was angry and alienated, a Boy Scout with a chip on my shoulder, a literal and metaphorical skateboarder. The message I internalized as a young teen: You can only count on yourself, Jeff.
Nirvana spoke to our souls for a reason. Today, at age 45-60, Gen X Man has made peace with our chip on the shoulder and our Grunge spirit. We are content with being content and secure with our place in the world — maybe too much so. As Gen X Man sees it, our generation is a “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit,” to borrow an old expression about North Carolina. In case it’s not obvious, the two mountains of conceit are boomers and Millennials.
This detached, self-satisfied, lone-wolf independence is core to Gen X Man. It is our greatest strength and our greatest liability. An astute Zoomer liberal arts student might diagnose me as having “toxic individualism,” to which I would reply, You may be right about that.
Gen X Man is like this: We are open. Willing to learn. Someone who acknowledges. And yet, when huddled around the grill with the other men, we laugh at the naughty jokes. We admit things have gotten too crazy, you know? But when the other men mock the Zoomer student’s nose piercings and excessive taxonomizing, we defend her.
Gen X Man is the mystic translator of generations. We are fluent in boomer ways but understand this New World in ways boomers never could. We appreciate the issues facing Zoomers and Millennials on an emotional level because we were on the front-end of the forces that fuel them. We are versed in the soft edges of contemporary professional culture. Instead of reflexively saying whatever and nevermind like we did when we were younger, we now say that’s interesting and let me think about it.
I mean let’s be real: Gen X Man built the New World we are all adapting to. Everyone else is just living in it. We are the ones who grabbed the machete, whacked away the weeds, and laid its foundation. We are the one who ditched the corporate path and built Big Tech. We are the ones who saw the failures of the government and built around it — SpaceX, Google, crypto, you name it. We are builders of worlds, like Zeus or Brahma but lower key. Is there any area of life Gen X Man hasn’t had to reinvent?
No one personifies the best and worst of our generation more than Elon Musk: Inventive as hell yet politically and geopolitically naive. Brilliant and visionary yet depressed and on ketamine. The richest man in the world yet still complaining about “elites.” Elon is our Bruce Wayne, our Dark Night.
What is with Gen X Man’s refusal to accept our own eliteness, anyways? I suppose it’s because, while boomers cling to power in old institutions, the social and political order of this New World is still taking root. Hence, Gen X Man has to reinvent what it means to be elite, once again laying groundwork for Millennials and Zoomers to build on. My work-around is to be the elite you wish to see.
Gen X Man was the last generation to grow up during the Cold War, and we never miss an opportunity to gloat about our childhoods in the 1980s. As a boy, I watched Rambo and Red Dawn and killed communists with imaginary machine guns. I identified the boys in the Goonies, the nerds in Sixteen Candles, the goths in Lost Boys, and the Christian Slater character in Pump up the Volume. Our childhoods were free-range AF. We enjoyed the fruits of a high-trust society until, like the break-up of my family, things changed.
Maybe this is why so many of us are doomers today — because we know what was lost. Gen X Man doesn’t appreciate that doomerism is a luxury belief younger people cannot afford. This is why I exhort us to move past it and forge new, optimistic paths into the future.
Gen X Man admires the collaborative, tech-savvy ways of younger guys even as we want to slap them upside the head. When Gen X Man and Late Millennial Man partner, we are unstoppable. But, like brothers with wildly different personalities, it isn’t easy to get along.
It’s easier for us to get along with Zoomers because they are many of our children. One Gen X Man I know asked his Zoomer Son, “What is with your ironic detachment?”
His son looked up and eyed Gen X Man. “I learned it from you.”
“Oh,” replied Gen X Man, reminded of the anti-drug PSA from his youth. “Right.”
Gen X Man doesn’t need to be seen, acknowledged, and validated the way Late Millennial Man does. Nor do we need to be reparented and rehabbed the way Zoomer Man does. We define ourselves by NOT BEING NEEDY, even though we secretly want people to recognize how awesome we are, and how important we are to building this New World.
The thing Gen X Man doesn’t realize, the thing we haven’t yet absorbed, is that everyone wants us to step up and LEAD MORE, especially as boomers exit over the next decade. Zoomers and Millennials may mock us, but they want us to be the dad, big-brother, or uncle figure who cares. They want us to create more structure for navigating this New World; to chair, advise and invest in their enterprises; to fat-shame them with love and a playbook to get fit, sober, and healthy. Do we realize this? Do we care?
Younger guys need Gen X Man more than we realize — much more than they are willing to say. I get that it is easier to do our own thing, to hunker down and focus on our own jobs and families, to force others to figure it out for themselves the way we had to. I feel that too.
But shouldn’t we give more than we got? Isn’t this the code of the Gen X Man and how we differ from boomers?
Now that we are on the far side of our midlife crises, the world is calling us to be elder-statesmen for this New World. What happens when we heed the call?
I don’t have a ready answer, but perhaps we should find out. I believe this New World needs Gen X Man’s leadership to become whole. Who cares whether this would make us great. Gen X Man just wants to be helpful.
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The experience of having a nice normal happy family and then having it all torn away from you mid-childhood...by voluntary election of your parents such that you never trust them again, is pretty formative. Divorce rates peaked in the early 80s after no fault divorce laws got implemented, so this happened to SO many of us. In reading your experience, it strikes me that you're almost not really fully Gen X if you didn't have a normal happy middle class married parents family that then went away some time in childhood and everything changed for the worse and you learned to build up fortress like walls and never trust anyone or have expectations if anyone or let anything hurt you ever again.
Or maybe that's just me. ;) But also you. Idk, literally my entire friend group of like 20 people, girls and boys, were in that boat growing up. And for the ones who weren't, we were a bad influence.
This is different from never having married parents to begin with, or parents who hate each other and were always fighting before they divorced. For a lot of kids in the 80s, you went from sitcom type normal happiness to suddenly having parents who didn't speak, shuttling between their homes of distracted parents paying attention to their new dating life, living out of a suitcase, and getting in trouble bc your parents were too checked out to know what you were up to, etc. it definitely ingrains in you, at a young age, that you can't count on anyone, not even the people who are supposed to care most and watch out for you. Like you I'm not complaining, I actually appreciate my excess stoicism and feel it's served me well, and I also had a great childhood regardless. But it kind of had a major attitudinal impact on the whole generation. Also bc divorce was such a a new thing back then, no one really knew how to talk about it and it was still kind of a weird shameful thing that you were just supposed to act like it never happened and get on with your life so no one had to feel sorry for you or make your mom feel bad.
I, too, was born in the mid-1970s. In 1983, I was in grade school, in Kansas, when "The Day After" was shown on national television. Just shy of twenty years later, I was a captain invading Iraq.
Like you, I also witnessed the flowering of generational theory. I remember that the term "Generation X" was taken from the title of a now-nearly-forgotten novel published in 1991. I remember how excited everybody got about Strauss and Howe's "Generations etc." (also 1991) and its sequel, "The Fourth Turning" (1997). I even remember seeing Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" in bookstores everywhere when I was a lieutenant.
I don't deny that each age cohort's passage through the phases of the human life cycle interacts with its particular historical context to impart some identifiable set of formative experiences and typical personal responses to them. I just think that the strength of this effect is now commonly overblown, as if everyone got HR's Powerpoint summation of what were once just trendy sociological theories, and took it as the key to understanding people.
During my career in the up-or-out military and the bureaucracy, I've seen people my age rise to progressively higher positions. We've gone from Kuwait, to the "peace dividend," to "peace enforcement" (or maybe SASO) in the Balkans, through the GWOT and COIN (not FID, COIN), and now to what we seem to have decided to call "great-power competition." Everyone learned the new sets of buzzwords, and clearly people who were company-grade officers in the 1980s patrolling the inter-German border tended to have different ways of looking at things, as compared to people who were company-grade officers patrolling occupied Iraq. But I don't know that their Strauss-Howe-Brokaw-etc. generational cohorts are the decisive factors here. How many bells do all the old dead buzzwords that I threw out in this paragraph ring for you? I would guess "not many."
This is not to deny that looking at age cohorts can yield insights; I just think that aggregating everyone in the United States into these cohorts elides far too much for the insights to be very useful. If we look at Watts' "The Final Pagan Generation," we see that he defines the topic of his book as men of a particular culture and class, born in a particular date range, in contrast with men of that culture and class born in other date ranges.