"Gen X Man doesn’t appreciate that doomerism is a luxury belief younger people cannot afford"
The best fictional example of this is in Mad Max 2 in the relationship between Max and the feral child with the boomerang. Max is despondent over the loss of purpose in life after the death of both his family and civilizational collapse; he remembers it all and carries it like a living tombstone. He eats food out of tin cans and feels humiliated but does what he needs to do survive.
The feral child he meets, though, has even less than Max. He barely has clothes, doesn't have friends and hunts small animals with a metal boomerang. But he's happy and doesn't consider his position to be very degraded at all since it's all he knows. Even the leftovers of a tin can are a delight to him, who has nothing. Max comes to realize that his despair is going to die with the last people who remember the old era and it gives him the motivation to try and help the kid along a bit.
I always wanted an Australian cattle dog like Mad Max’s dog, he named “dog.” I was going to name my cattle dog “Cortese” after the immortal Dan Cortese who hosted MTV Sports.
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.
Yeah totally. Divorce was formative for us, and all the more traumatic if you were raised singing LDS songs like "Families can be together forever." I like your point about new mass divorce was, and we were on the front of dealing with it. I remember my mom attended a live "Phil Donahue" show in the audience. I think she asked a question. Anyways, it caused a minor scandal in my family that today feels so of that era.
Explaining to Zoomers what a divorced Dad or Mom apartment is. At some point in Gen X childhood you either lived in or had a friend who lived in Daniel Larusso’s apartment from the Karate Kid.
I mean, pretty much every cat I know or heard of was raised by a single mom, but I always thought that human kittens of divorced parents must think to themselves that "if mom and dad stopped loving each other, will they stop loving me, next?"
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.
There's something "peak Gen X" about resisting the clustering of people into generations — ha. I agree with your points, though. As we grow, diversify, and balkanize as a society, a more intersectional approach to grouping people into cohorts would bring more precision. For example, I likely have more in common with white, well-educated, upwardly middle-class Eagle Scout type guys across generations than I do with the average guy in our generation. That said, any grouping is going to involve gross generalizations. With this series of posts, I'm speaking to different generations of men based on what I see as the central need or theme. It might be crude but seems to be touching a nerve among some. I haven't read "The Final Pagan Generation" but will check it out — a lot to learn from late-stage empires, I'm sure. I don't have a military background but have enough exposure that I understood all of your references except SASO (Googled it). Thanks for reading and commenting.
As a Gen X'er, I have been struggling with my purpose, sandwiched between boomers and zoomers. The only conclusion I have come to is that we need to lead. That is difficult as the aging boomers are still clinging the levers of power, as if it is some magic elixir that wards off the ravages of time. The difference between X'ers and boomers is that we know time is undefeated. Perhaps we should start there...
Hi Bruce - Thanks for reading and commenting. Boomers exiting over the next decade is going to open up the playing field for leadership far more than anyone expects, imo. While boomers still cling to power, I think Gen X guys like us are now asking: What's our unique leadership area and style? What kind of elders do we want to become? It's an emergent thing we are inventing here and now. I'll be interested in following your journey.
I agree with the sentiment that X'ers will fill the power vacuums. More than 'leading' I feel X'ers duty is to teach and to shelter.
Teaching: X'ers are going to undoubtedly be the best in 100 years at what they do, no matter what it is. The best programmer, best general, best homesteader, best scientist, etc. is going to be an X'er and we won't see their like again for 100 years. I think they've come to resent how unappreciated they are, how exploited they were and how unable both older boomers and younger millenials/zoomers are in matching their skill. Trying to pry knowledge out of a master X'er is like approaching a martial arts hermit in a mountain. But these master X'ers are individuals first and always while Millenials have the ability to form entire institutions. A thousand Millienials with 50% of the X'ers skill is going to do more than the lone wolf X, but I suppose the emotional toll is that they won't feel like they have a true successor to their 100%.
Sheltering: Boomers, frankly, threw millenials and zoomers into meat grinders. Student debt, housing prices, inflation and now this recent draft and the desperate surge to start WW3. X will need to somehow curb the worse consequences of this stuff so that Millenials can have breathing room to build new things. Just housing prices are so high that Millenials who want to form trad-families simply can't; one possibility is that X will have to stop Boomers from protecting their Boomer housing price assets at the cost of the future. Or stopping the true draft from killing every younger person, or the vax from killing the babies, or government regulations from strangling every new business attempt. Stuff like that. Boomer WILL die soon, very soon, and their thrashing threatens to wipe out Millenials back to square 0 or square -1 (crippled and dead) yet again as they've done over and over before (2000 dot com crash, 2008, etc).
Your last point, about risks to Millennials and Zoomers from Boomer thrashing is very true. Younger folks are starting to get resentful toward Gen X, which I find baffling since boomers have much more to account for imo.
I am not so sure. I was one of the Wall Street refugees in 2009.-2010. My wife left me once the money was gone (she was in the Obama administration then off to Goldman Sachs, you cannot make this shit up). I just took off, lived in a Buddhist monastery. I work in a low-stress public sector job now. I make less money than my first job out of university in 2000. But I am happy and I do quality work that benefits my community. But I am very far from self-sufficient. I like leaning on my much improved current wife. That is another priviledge that we have. We all pretty much can get younger women because men sort of disappeared into the collective basement.
Fuckin great read. On point and every word I felt as if it was describing only myself. We are a great generation, very individual, very secure in who we are, the last to have semi normal free range childhoods. We are a wise bunch, maybe we should fill the void more, but then, meh, let them figure it out, I’ll be fine. 😎
The last of Gen X was graduating high school as I was entering my freshman year. The older I get, the more I wished I were born 5 years earlier. Van Halen, Def Leppard, and the reign of Schwarzenegger in the movies are eras of art that, to me, are missing in today's computer generated graphics produced as cheap as possible art. Watching Terminator 2 with my kids, they noticed the difference in having real fire when they blew up the building. So much of modern life is fake to me. Guys used to build cars in their driveways. Now they sit and play games on the internet to socialize. Seems less than manly, in a way.
What do Gen Xers make of all the 1980's nostalgia we've seen in the last 5-10 years? Stranger Things... is very much a thing. Many Millennials and Zoomers in the YouTube pop culture criticism space have decried how many franchises have "gone woke" (ref: Star Wars). There seems to be a collective unconscious realization that somehow things have gone wrong, and looking back to the 1980's and 1990's has a certain relevance. This is in marked contrast to the 1990's, when everyone not a Boomer was incredibly annoyed with all the 1960's nostalgia.
Maybe this is an area where bridges could be built? Certainly within Millennials at least, the divide within the generation is great thanks to all the polarizing currents of the 2010's.
1980s nostalgia is catnip to X. Stranger Things strikes me as cleverly designed to appeal across Z, Millennials, and X generations. I do think there's something to the joke that everyone idealizes the society as it was when they were ten years old. For Xers, this was in the 1980s. Do Millennials and Z's idealize the time when they were 10 in the same way? Idk.
There's also the cultural stagnation argument... that aside from technology, pretty much anything from the early 2000's onwards looks like it could be made today (excepting for "woke casting", political messaging, or avoiding the "male gaze"). There's far more of a difference between 1990, 1995, and 1999 music and fashion wise than say 2010 with 2024. With streaming TV and smart phones, you have cultural hyperfragmentation. With so few cultural common points, it's hard to imagine what Gen Z could even be nostalgic for collectively. But that'll likely depend just how different the 2030's are technologically, especially to what extent generative AI takes off.
I guess we'll see what happens as Gen X starts taking over TV/film institutions - do we see a sudden rise of 90s nostalgia shows? Because the people currently in control clearly either don't think it's old enough to have nostalgia appeal or just don't like the era, because I can't think of a single modern show or film set in that time.
I'm 41 and a woman and yet I can't tell you how much this sums up my thoughts about how we should be helping the next generations. My husband and I are in a weird industry, but we've done the Gen X thing and just built around the Boomers to do our own (more rational) thing, and it's been a success. But then young people come along and want help/advice and we sympathize and want to help, but struggle to think of what to say other than, "you'll have to just figure something out." Nothing we did specifically will scale. It's the attitude of work-around that you have to have, but they don't. So what happens next?
Fellow 1990's skateboarder, and the correct move reference should have been Christian Slater in Gleaming the Cube. It was the better movie. It had Tony Hawk driving a Pizza Hut truck!
I feel bad for modern young people, never having cool mall jobs at 16, after working horrific fast food jobs for the previous two years to buy a car to get to the cool mall job. They care so much about their image. They are the antithesis of who we were. I am amazed that they are okay looking like that, like they are trying too hard. Perhaps we simply missed the horrors of ubiquitous porn and quality video games. In any case, I think we were the last generation who had it easy. We had sex partners and triumphs, whereas these kids seem to only have humiliations.
I do have one question. Do people of our rough generation do the mid life crises? I thought that was made up, like multiple personality disorder and Satanist child molester rings.
I feel one-upped with the "Gleaming the Cube" reference. Well done. :) Regarding the mid-life crisis topic, I'd say my 40s has been a big mid-life crisis story arc, and I'm on the far side of it now. So speaking from personal experience, I'd say we do have mid-life crises, but they don't necessarily fit the boomer mold of a divorce and a convertible. For Gen X, it may show up as ennui and a search for purpose and meaning... but that's just a guess.
I noticed a lot of Gen Xers (me included) got skateboards and a pair of Vans to ride around the neighborhood while working from home. I kept my new skateboard still ride it. Maybe that’s a midlife crisis for an X man.
Damn, another email from another substack subscription. But if all your writings are as good as this then it'll be worth it.
I was born in '67 and just made the cut for Gen X by two years. If you do the math, I went through high school and college during the 80s. So yes, it was obviously the best time ever. My parents didn't get divorced until I was in college but mom decided to get a job when I started high school so my younger brother and I got the latchkey kid experience anyway. Even before that though, we were thrown out in the morning and called home for dinner in the evening so we were basically left to our own devices since we were about five or six years old. Of course, the same was true for all the other kids in the neighborhood so we had plenty of company.
I read the comment of the zoomer who was hurt by the indifference and lack of affection from his Xer dad and that really hit home. My parents weren't affectionate at all. The only time I can recall them saying "I love you" was when I got suspended from high school. It was something like, "How could you be so stupid? You know we love you, right?" I've worked really hard to not be like them. Still, I'm a bit awkward with affection and can be a bit dismissive. Its a work in progress but I'm aware of it and trying to do better.
As you noted, the experience of being left alone all day to figure things out for ourselves has caused X men to be industrious and self-sufficient. We have plenty to offer the younger generations and its our obligation to provide our knowledge and experience so they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do something. Because we don't really feel like wasting time being fake and putting on airs, we should have authenticity with the younger generations. I've found the zoomers to be particularly approachable, even the ones with face tattoos and all the piercings. They're good kids and they can be great adults with a little help. Time to step up, X men.
Thanks for explaining Gen X to me. I've not been able to put my finger on it. As a Boomer+, I float along in my cocoon mostly interacting with those like me. Observing but not understanding those following after me. I don't get the urge to have a tattoo. And as for the girl with the nose rings - I want to ask, how does she handle a head cold? Camille Paglia discusses us slipping out an Apollonian era (40's & 50's) into a Dionysian one (60's & 70's). Rigid standards gave way (after Viet Nam) to "do your own thing". "Whatever" became the response. The studio system that manufactured Stars is gone. Fashion no longer has dictators that told what to wear this Fall. But standards gave us structure - even if we bridled under them. Lots, if not most, standards are gone. But I still try to adhere to some that I appreciate. I dress up to go to the theatre. I don't wear Birkenstocks and overalls to the opera - as some younger folks do. Dystopian images becoming reality seem to be the goal. Yes, Gen Xers HAVE given us a lot. And, I hope they're ready to take over from us geezers - but are they?
My gen X dad was practically raised by Hawkeye on MASH, treating every single problem in life with a wry smile or, if too stressful, simply walking away from it. A frustrating binary. He has never once hugged me of his own volition.
Almost like a touch of autism, but something fully of choice and habit.
That must've been frustrating and emotionally tough. I get triggered when people shut down or wave off real issues as a result of similar family dynamics... so I know a little bit about how that feels. Sorry he couldn't just be direct with you and warmer.
Took me years to admit I hated him for being physically there, but emotionally absent. Took me just as many to be forgive him, after getting the full picture of a typical latch key self raising.
His brother and sister were planned. He came ten years later. I always knew that but it clicked waaay later.
"Gen X Man doesn’t appreciate that doomerism is a luxury belief younger people cannot afford"
The best fictional example of this is in Mad Max 2 in the relationship between Max and the feral child with the boomerang. Max is despondent over the loss of purpose in life after the death of both his family and civilizational collapse; he remembers it all and carries it like a living tombstone. He eats food out of tin cans and feels humiliated but does what he needs to do survive.
The feral child he meets, though, has even less than Max. He barely has clothes, doesn't have friends and hunts small animals with a metal boomerang. But he's happy and doesn't consider his position to be very degraded at all since it's all he knows. Even the leftovers of a tin can are a delight to him, who has nothing. Max comes to realize that his despair is going to die with the last people who remember the old era and it gives him the motivation to try and help the kid along a bit.
That's an incredible reference point, Dave. Thank you.
I always wanted an Australian cattle dog like Mad Max’s dog, he named “dog.” I was going to name my cattle dog “Cortese” after the immortal Dan Cortese who hosted MTV Sports.
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.
Yeah totally. Divorce was formative for us, and all the more traumatic if you were raised singing LDS songs like "Families can be together forever." I like your point about new mass divorce was, and we were on the front of dealing with it. I remember my mom attended a live "Phil Donahue" show in the audience. I think she asked a question. Anyways, it caused a minor scandal in my family that today feels so of that era.
Explaining to Zoomers what a divorced Dad or Mom apartment is. At some point in Gen X childhood you either lived in or had a friend who lived in Daniel Larusso’s apartment from the Karate Kid.
I mean, pretty much every cat I know or heard of was raised by a single mom, but I always thought that human kittens of divorced parents must think to themselves that "if mom and dad stopped loving each other, will they stop loving me, next?"
Yeah, especially when they CHOSE each other and stood up and made vows and stuff, while they just kind of randomly got stuck with you.
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.
There's something "peak Gen X" about resisting the clustering of people into generations — ha. I agree with your points, though. As we grow, diversify, and balkanize as a society, a more intersectional approach to grouping people into cohorts would bring more precision. For example, I likely have more in common with white, well-educated, upwardly middle-class Eagle Scout type guys across generations than I do with the average guy in our generation. That said, any grouping is going to involve gross generalizations. With this series of posts, I'm speaking to different generations of men based on what I see as the central need or theme. It might be crude but seems to be touching a nerve among some. I haven't read "The Final Pagan Generation" but will check it out — a lot to learn from late-stage empires, I'm sure. I don't have a military background but have enough exposure that I understood all of your references except SASO (Googled it). Thanks for reading and commenting.
An astute Zoomer liberal arts student might diagnose me as having “toxic individualism,”
Yeah, well, fuck them.
lol
We were all blessed with this gift
As a Gen X'er, I have been struggling with my purpose, sandwiched between boomers and zoomers. The only conclusion I have come to is that we need to lead. That is difficult as the aging boomers are still clinging the levers of power, as if it is some magic elixir that wards off the ravages of time. The difference between X'ers and boomers is that we know time is undefeated. Perhaps we should start there...
Hi Bruce - Thanks for reading and commenting. Boomers exiting over the next decade is going to open up the playing field for leadership far more than anyone expects, imo. While boomers still cling to power, I think Gen X guys like us are now asking: What's our unique leadership area and style? What kind of elders do we want to become? It's an emergent thing we are inventing here and now. I'll be interested in following your journey.
I agree with the sentiment that X'ers will fill the power vacuums. More than 'leading' I feel X'ers duty is to teach and to shelter.
Teaching: X'ers are going to undoubtedly be the best in 100 years at what they do, no matter what it is. The best programmer, best general, best homesteader, best scientist, etc. is going to be an X'er and we won't see their like again for 100 years. I think they've come to resent how unappreciated they are, how exploited they were and how unable both older boomers and younger millenials/zoomers are in matching their skill. Trying to pry knowledge out of a master X'er is like approaching a martial arts hermit in a mountain. But these master X'ers are individuals first and always while Millenials have the ability to form entire institutions. A thousand Millienials with 50% of the X'ers skill is going to do more than the lone wolf X, but I suppose the emotional toll is that they won't feel like they have a true successor to their 100%.
Sheltering: Boomers, frankly, threw millenials and zoomers into meat grinders. Student debt, housing prices, inflation and now this recent draft and the desperate surge to start WW3. X will need to somehow curb the worse consequences of this stuff so that Millenials can have breathing room to build new things. Just housing prices are so high that Millenials who want to form trad-families simply can't; one possibility is that X will have to stop Boomers from protecting their Boomer housing price assets at the cost of the future. Or stopping the true draft from killing every younger person, or the vax from killing the babies, or government regulations from strangling every new business attempt. Stuff like that. Boomer WILL die soon, very soon, and their thrashing threatens to wipe out Millenials back to square 0 or square -1 (crippled and dead) yet again as they've done over and over before (2000 dot com crash, 2008, etc).
Astute points Dave. I like what you mentioned about Gen X skills/knowledge.
I agree re housing and wrote a piece on about affordability as a generational (and gendered) issue here: https://jeffgiesea.substack.com/p/housing-affordability-is-a-tremendous.
Your last point, about risks to Millennials and Zoomers from Boomer thrashing is very true. Younger folks are starting to get resentful toward Gen X, which I find baffling since boomers have much more to account for imo.
I am not so sure. I was one of the Wall Street refugees in 2009.-2010. My wife left me once the money was gone (she was in the Obama administration then off to Goldman Sachs, you cannot make this shit up). I just took off, lived in a Buddhist monastery. I work in a low-stress public sector job now. I make less money than my first job out of university in 2000. But I am happy and I do quality work that benefits my community. But I am very far from self-sufficient. I like leaning on my much improved current wife. That is another priviledge that we have. We all pretty much can get younger women because men sort of disappeared into the collective basement.
Fuckin great read. On point and every word I felt as if it was describing only myself. We are a great generation, very individual, very secure in who we are, the last to have semi normal free range childhoods. We are a wise bunch, maybe we should fill the void more, but then, meh, let them figure it out, I’ll be fine. 😎
Haha. Thanks for the kind words, Eric. Glad it resonates.
It did. Following, hope to see more insightful material in the future.
The last of Gen X was graduating high school as I was entering my freshman year. The older I get, the more I wished I were born 5 years earlier. Van Halen, Def Leppard, and the reign of Schwarzenegger in the movies are eras of art that, to me, are missing in today's computer generated graphics produced as cheap as possible art. Watching Terminator 2 with my kids, they noticed the difference in having real fire when they blew up the building. So much of modern life is fake to me. Guys used to build cars in their driveways. Now they sit and play games on the internet to socialize. Seems less than manly, in a way.
What do Gen Xers make of all the 1980's nostalgia we've seen in the last 5-10 years? Stranger Things... is very much a thing. Many Millennials and Zoomers in the YouTube pop culture criticism space have decried how many franchises have "gone woke" (ref: Star Wars). There seems to be a collective unconscious realization that somehow things have gone wrong, and looking back to the 1980's and 1990's has a certain relevance. This is in marked contrast to the 1990's, when everyone not a Boomer was incredibly annoyed with all the 1960's nostalgia.
Maybe this is an area where bridges could be built? Certainly within Millennials at least, the divide within the generation is great thanks to all the polarizing currents of the 2010's.
1980s nostalgia is catnip to X. Stranger Things strikes me as cleverly designed to appeal across Z, Millennials, and X generations. I do think there's something to the joke that everyone idealizes the society as it was when they were ten years old. For Xers, this was in the 1980s. Do Millennials and Z's idealize the time when they were 10 in the same way? Idk.
Millennials definitely have 1990's nostalgia.
There's also the cultural stagnation argument... that aside from technology, pretty much anything from the early 2000's onwards looks like it could be made today (excepting for "woke casting", political messaging, or avoiding the "male gaze"). There's far more of a difference between 1990, 1995, and 1999 music and fashion wise than say 2010 with 2024. With streaming TV and smart phones, you have cultural hyperfragmentation. With so few cultural common points, it's hard to imagine what Gen Z could even be nostalgic for collectively. But that'll likely depend just how different the 2030's are technologically, especially to what extent generative AI takes off.
I guess we'll see what happens as Gen X starts taking over TV/film institutions - do we see a sudden rise of 90s nostalgia shows? Because the people currently in control clearly either don't think it's old enough to have nostalgia appeal or just don't like the era, because I can't think of a single modern show or film set in that time.
I'm 41 and a woman and yet I can't tell you how much this sums up my thoughts about how we should be helping the next generations. My husband and I are in a weird industry, but we've done the Gen X thing and just built around the Boomers to do our own (more rational) thing, and it's been a success. But then young people come along and want help/advice and we sympathize and want to help, but struggle to think of what to say other than, "you'll have to just figure something out." Nothing we did specifically will scale. It's the attitude of work-around that you have to have, but they don't. So what happens next?
The X-zoomer alliance will save the country
Wow, this is good. In many ways, turns the mirror upon myself, and then makes me realize that that is an action I have never done very much of.
Thanks Daniel, glad you like it.
Fellow 1990's skateboarder, and the correct move reference should have been Christian Slater in Gleaming the Cube. It was the better movie. It had Tony Hawk driving a Pizza Hut truck!
I feel bad for modern young people, never having cool mall jobs at 16, after working horrific fast food jobs for the previous two years to buy a car to get to the cool mall job. They care so much about their image. They are the antithesis of who we were. I am amazed that they are okay looking like that, like they are trying too hard. Perhaps we simply missed the horrors of ubiquitous porn and quality video games. In any case, I think we were the last generation who had it easy. We had sex partners and triumphs, whereas these kids seem to only have humiliations.
I do have one question. Do people of our rough generation do the mid life crises? I thought that was made up, like multiple personality disorder and Satanist child molester rings.
I feel one-upped with the "Gleaming the Cube" reference. Well done. :) Regarding the mid-life crisis topic, I'd say my 40s has been a big mid-life crisis story arc, and I'm on the far side of it now. So speaking from personal experience, I'd say we do have mid-life crises, but they don't necessarily fit the boomer mold of a divorce and a convertible. For Gen X, it may show up as ennui and a search for purpose and meaning... but that's just a guess.
I noticed a lot of Gen Xers (me included) got skateboards and a pair of Vans to ride around the neighborhood while working from home. I kept my new skateboard still ride it. Maybe that’s a midlife crisis for an X man.
Well, I may have lived in a Buddhist monastery for a while, but I was in my early thirties, so that totally does not count. Totally.
Damn, another email from another substack subscription. But if all your writings are as good as this then it'll be worth it.
I was born in '67 and just made the cut for Gen X by two years. If you do the math, I went through high school and college during the 80s. So yes, it was obviously the best time ever. My parents didn't get divorced until I was in college but mom decided to get a job when I started high school so my younger brother and I got the latchkey kid experience anyway. Even before that though, we were thrown out in the morning and called home for dinner in the evening so we were basically left to our own devices since we were about five or six years old. Of course, the same was true for all the other kids in the neighborhood so we had plenty of company.
I read the comment of the zoomer who was hurt by the indifference and lack of affection from his Xer dad and that really hit home. My parents weren't affectionate at all. The only time I can recall them saying "I love you" was when I got suspended from high school. It was something like, "How could you be so stupid? You know we love you, right?" I've worked really hard to not be like them. Still, I'm a bit awkward with affection and can be a bit dismissive. Its a work in progress but I'm aware of it and trying to do better.
As you noted, the experience of being left alone all day to figure things out for ourselves has caused X men to be industrious and self-sufficient. We have plenty to offer the younger generations and its our obligation to provide our knowledge and experience so they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do something. Because we don't really feel like wasting time being fake and putting on airs, we should have authenticity with the younger generations. I've found the zoomers to be particularly approachable, even the ones with face tattoos and all the piercings. They're good kids and they can be great adults with a little help. Time to step up, X men.
I relate to your comments, Big Ugly — yes to all of this. Thanks for reading and commenting.
Also born in ‘67. Spot on.
Thanks for explaining Gen X to me. I've not been able to put my finger on it. As a Boomer+, I float along in my cocoon mostly interacting with those like me. Observing but not understanding those following after me. I don't get the urge to have a tattoo. And as for the girl with the nose rings - I want to ask, how does she handle a head cold? Camille Paglia discusses us slipping out an Apollonian era (40's & 50's) into a Dionysian one (60's & 70's). Rigid standards gave way (after Viet Nam) to "do your own thing". "Whatever" became the response. The studio system that manufactured Stars is gone. Fashion no longer has dictators that told what to wear this Fall. But standards gave us structure - even if we bridled under them. Lots, if not most, standards are gone. But I still try to adhere to some that I appreciate. I dress up to go to the theatre. I don't wear Birkenstocks and overalls to the opera - as some younger folks do. Dystopian images becoming reality seem to be the goal. Yes, Gen Xers HAVE given us a lot. And, I hope they're ready to take over from us geezers - but are they?
Thanks John, good thoughts. You are one of my favorite geezers... a model geezer!
*sigh*
yeah.
I’m very curious about that sigh. What would it say if it had a voice? Is it a sigh of relief or of “one more thing to add to the list”?
It has a voice. It is the sound of “and” - both relief and one more thing to add to the list.
I see. Fair enough.
Detached is right.
My gen X dad was practically raised by Hawkeye on MASH, treating every single problem in life with a wry smile or, if too stressful, simply walking away from it. A frustrating binary. He has never once hugged me of his own volition.
Almost like a touch of autism, but something fully of choice and habit.
That must've been frustrating and emotionally tough. I get triggered when people shut down or wave off real issues as a result of similar family dynamics... so I know a little bit about how that feels. Sorry he couldn't just be direct with you and warmer.
Took me years to admit I hated him for being physically there, but emotionally absent. Took me just as many to be forgive him, after getting the full picture of a typical latch key self raising.
His brother and sister were planned. He came ten years later. I always knew that but it clicked waaay later.
I did lots of therapy over similar issues. Sigh, it sucks.