Generation X – we did stuff, we saw stuff

Generation X – Gen X as we like to be called – spans the fifteen years from 1965 to 1980 which makes us now, in 2024, middle-aged.

That burns a bit. We were the cool kids, generationally speaking, at least we like to think so. To hear us talk, you’d think we invented everything, including hardship. I quite liked aspects of my childhood – the freedom to explore, and the lack of responsibility or supervision, but I’m not sure I’d label it the best that ever was or could be. Societally, I thought it was all right.

I only recently learned that we were feral and uncared for, forced by exigent circumstances to partake in that most dire of horrors, water from the garden hose.

But we’re middle-aged in a good way. Fifty is the new thirty, or some crap like that. You can Botox and fill what you want to: gravity plus living plus time equals middle-aged joints. It’s hard to Oil of Olay the insides though I’m sure there are things one can do if they have piles of cash. We’re better with aging than generations that came before, but we’re about to be outdone.

The youth of today will likely look like they’re in their late twenties until their sixties.

The Details

Did you ever read Douglas Copeland’s Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture? I was a liberal arts student majoring in political science in 1991 when it came out, so I gobbled it up, though I don’t remember much about it years on, which means I didn’t like it as much as some others. I remember Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fianovar Trilogy quite clearly decades on (I revisited it recently)

Copeland’s book was my first introduction to the idea that I belonged to a universal group by virtue of my age, and that membership in it was mandatory. I had a community beyond the one I could perceive at university. I had a designation beyond gender.

Generations are the global designations that connect us with millions who have things in common with us that extend beyond national borders. Generations share global lived experiences based on our position in time.  

Gen X showed up while the world was busy – we lived through a lot. We lived in a state of near-constant war and political tension – global politics was a volatile thing for our entire childhood, and those of us who hit our teens in the early eighties – hello, Stranger Things – also lived with the threat of it going nuclear.

Perhaps that’s why our generation’s reactions to current events, while fierce, lack panic. We’ve been here before. Our sangfroid is probably a mistake.

Gen X is the generation of flux. We were the harbingers of change, and the changes in society have been significant. We’re the generation that bridges the shift from analog to digital. We’re the generation of significant social change.  

It was a time of increased freedom for women. It was also the beginning of pushback. We read Susan Faludi’s The Undeclared War Against Women and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. We were working more and in increasingly important jobs. We were going to colleges and planning careers – gone were the days of the MRS degree. Gen X women were the birth control pill, independence, and Cosmopolitan.

Gen X became latchkey kids as our mothers embraced the same freedoms. We were the MTV generation. ^[i]

We witnessed the rise of AIDS and the bigotries it exposed. We lived through the crack epidemic, through gas wars that saw some places in North America reduced to rationing, and through mortgage rates in the double-digits that saw thousands walk away from their homes. The current housing crisis began there as the housing stock was bought by not individuals.  

We are the generation of financial insecurity.

We saw the rise of the televangelist and the money-making machinery that came with it. We watched movies that expanded our minds, and political assassinations that broke our hearts.

Television became twenty-four-seven. We saw the birth of CNN and subsequently saw more of the world unfiltered. We learned that the world is a difficult place. We watched fairytale marriages and space shuttle explosions.

We got Walkman’s and took our tunes on the road.

We gave birth to the gospel of greed, and for that, you have my apologies. Gen X is Alex P. Keaton and Gordon Gecko. We’re Reaganomics and homelessness. We also appear to be, and perhaps this is ironic, the last of the middle class.

We were the “failure to launch” generation, for all the conservative pundits like to frame that phenomenon as a new and exciting glitch, and the first boomerang generation, adults who had to move back home to mom and dad to financially regroup.

We’re the first generation that won’t be financially better off than the one that came before. My apologies to Millennials (Gen Y) and Gen Z for that as well – the trend continues.

Gen X hits midlife

I’m Gen X, so I’m solidly midlife. My fifties aren’t my thirties, though I feel okay. But I miss being young.

There are big changes in your life as you age out of young. Your kids – if you have them, and if they can manage it – start moving out. Living without kids after a couple of decades of raising them is a big adjustment. Suddenly, the house seems large.

Your parents are getting towards the end of life if they haven’t died already. Everything about that is hard, and it happens whether you have kids or not.

Friendships end or change. How does it go – we’re friends for a reason, season, or lifetime. There’s nothing like kids launching to clarify relationships. It turns out a lot of our relationships are seasonal. Which is annoying. There’s no Gen X kindergarten for me to attend and meet more. And the neurodivergent don’t do so well with relationship apps (I’m taking my experience and making it global).

There are, however, social groups one can join on Facebook because of course, there are. The number of groups on Facebook is functionally infinite. My interests vary, so I follow many, but they include some Gen X ones.  

The Gen X ones I follow are similar to these: Gen X Women Are Tired of Your Whining, Growing up Gen X, Everything 70s and 80s, and so on. The groups number into the thousands; the possibilities are endless. You can specialize – Gen X Bowlers, Gen X fans of Friends, Gen X Women Who Travel, Gen X Nostalgia – or stay a generalist, which is my preference.

The nostalgia posts are my favourites, the “remember” ones. Remember that show, that candy, that food? There was a soda in the late seventies and early eighties put out by the Coca-Cola company called, Aspen. It was green apple-flavoured, and it was delicious.

And it’s nice to know that the game Perfection, and the movie The NeverEnding Story traumatized us all.

Of late, however, I’ve started noticing a tone. Not all of Gen X is in midlife. Some of them skipped middle-aged and went straight to old.

Get off the grass

Do you remember the stories your parents and grandparents would tell you about growing up? About how things were, and about how hard things were in comparison to our easy-bake-oven lives? The outhouse stories, or the walking everywhere stories, or the “we didn’t have an X when I was growing up” stories

Uphill both ways in the snow to school, with boxes for shoes. Needles the size of drinking straws. Travel that took weeks. It’s a weird form of nostalgia, a clinging to the memory of when things were worse with a sense of pride. It wasn’t always that way – my parents used to ring the bells with the new and exciting. My dad for a long time was an early tech adopter. But things change as we age.

I don’t remember when my parents crossed the line, when “crotchety” became an applicable adjective, when many of their complaints started to become variants of “kids today.” There’s a shrinkage that comes along with aging sometimes, a contraction of one’s life and interests.

Imagine my chagrin when I started noticing the same crotchety tendency in some of the social media posts shared by my fellow Gen X warriors. Memes became less about television shows we loved – Scarecrow and Mrs. King – and more about the dire and drastic state of “kids today.”

The complainers seemed to think that life would be best served if everything stayed as it was when we were teens. Excluding tech, of course. We didn’t have cell phones at the roller skate arenas.

And Gen X is seriously scarred over the drinking hose thing. For the record, it was fine.

The complaints cover a lot of territory, but the gradual loss of cursive seems to me a particular bee in people’s bonnets. I guess they practice the calligraphy of old in their spare time. I guess they calculate with abacuses and slide rules. To summarize:

Kids today are selfish and only think about themselves. They have no respect for their parents or old age (or Gen X). They have no self-control, they talk like they know everything, and they ignore the information we try to share with them. And the girls are loud, overly sexual, and unfeminine. The Millennials and Gen Z kids are spoiled. They love tech, they’re rude to others, and they’re unpleasant to be around wherever they get together. They’re rude, they talk back, and they’re materialistic. And as for their education, they treat their teachers like garbage.

It never seems to occur to the complainers that we raised these kids.  

It never seems to occur to the complainers that they sound like old people desperately in need of sleep.

Yes, Gen X had it tough. Yes, we can write in cursive. Yes, we drank from the hose and rode without seatbelts. Yes, we were free-range kids who only came home when it got dark.

I guess we had better parents.

I guess Gen X better start scheduling more naps. For myself, I plan to stay current and thus stave off the dreaded grumpy atrophy.  

As for the above summation of Gen X complaints, it’s both accurate and historical. These are the things Gen X is whinging about on Facebook pages and in the press, but the above is a paraphrasing of a couple of quotes by Socrates (469 – 399 BCE). The “kids today” argument has long legs:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners and contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.

Socrates

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[i] Latchkey kids refer to kids coming home from school to an empty house regularly.

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